Neomeme

John McCain has a MySpace page. John McCain’s staffers hotlinked some images, and John McCain’s blog got sort-of-hacked. Then it got fixed, except with a little misspelling. McCain isn’t the only one to jump into social networking- the Obama campaign actually created a social network to organize supporters. And Obama has an extremely fast-growing Facebook group. Undoubtedly, all candidates are realizing the power of social networks to mobilize and organize a new voter base, based on the personal connections only a social network like MySpace can provide. Unfortunately, these efforts to reach out to those hip kids on the internets are as hollow and contrived as many politicians themselves. Read more »

This is pretty cool in a subversive sort of way. The description is as follows:

Brett Tabke experiments with writing a weblog in a text file usually read only by robots. Commentary on the world of search engine marketing.

In the age of increasing features creep in complex CMS and blogging platforms like Wordpress, it’s refreshing to see something so old-school. Of course, on that particular blog, comments are not allowed, so I think I’ll stick with Wordpress.com.

Here’s a riddle for you: What’s invisible to those inside it but painfully obvious to outsiders?

Answer: The A-List of bloggers.

Recently, there’s been a lot of criticism coming from the likes of Robert Scoble, Jason Calacanis, Steve Rubel and Loren Feldman of the concept of an “A-list” of top celebrity bloggers. They all agree that either there is no A-list, or the A-list is not important, and that A-listers are not special and that anyone can join at any time, if only the rest of us weren’t so damn lazy. They’re all wrong. Read more »

Note: This post is more extensive than your average blog meme post because I’m not like normal people and I like to deconstruct things and figure out how they work. I have a healthy dose of the hacker spirit, going all the way to when I was 5 and I took apart my father’s very expensive new camera.

KuiperCliff has popped my blog meme cherry by linking to me with the Tech Link Train, a blog meme that asks you to link to five science or technology blogs. This has been zipping around the blogosphere extremely quickly, undoubtedly because it
has all of the elements of a succesful meme- it has a simple yet somewhat specific premise, it is set up for growth via the pyramid effect(each blog links to five blogs, ideally each one of those blogs links to five blogs and so on), and it provides a clear benefit to the linkers by requiring that all of the “stops” of the train carry the full list of blogs participating in the meme. All of this obviously has tons of principles from the science of memetics, which I of course am a huge fan of(hence the title of this blog). So, just for fun, I decided to follow the meme, tracing it to its source. Read more »

I used to hate Twitter. Until a little thing called twittervision came along. Twittervision completely changed my perspective of Twitter,and it did so when I began to see the once character that has, for as long as I can remember, been a beacon of digital communication and interaction. Over and over, as the Twitter map jumped back and forth from London to Chicago, Sao Paulo to Lyon, I saw the same little symbol in hundreds and hundreds of posts: I saw the @. And that little @, repeated over and over again, completely changed what I think of Twitter. Read more »

Update: The Digg story has been buried by Digg staff…go figure.

For quite a long time, Digg founder Kevin Rose has had nothing more than an ambiguous “soon.” on his personal website. Curious to see whether there was anything else hiding in his site, I did a Google search for all pages on that domain. It turns out that Kevin was planning to keep a Wordpress blog on the site, with a Wordpress install already active. After installing Wordpress, Kevin Rose seems to have neglected the site, and thus did not install the Wordpress security updates. Which resulted in this friendly defacement on March 6th, 2007: Read more »

I was lucky enough to get an invite to the alpha of Freebase, the semantic Web 3.0 knowledge application that everyone’s talking about. I’ve been eagerly playing with it for most of last night and some of last morning, and I like what I see. Tim O’Reilly gives a good overview of the concepts behind Freebase, but he does not really demonstrate the killer app, the features that make Freebase so damn… cool.

Basically, Freebase is a fully object-oriented Wikipedia. The concept will be instantly familiar to OOP programmers- every entry is an object. As an object, it has attributes called fields, such as “Name” and descends from classes called types, like “Film” or “Person”. An article will have different fields based on the type it is- for example, Person will have fields like birthdate (in turn an object of type “date”). Objects can inherit characterisics from multiple classes, like Person and Blogger. Metaweb, the company behind Freebase aptly terms it an open-data project.

Okay, enough with the geeky stuff. What are some of the cool things we can do with Freebase right now, the “killer apps” that make it shine?

Read more »

It seems that suddenly the entire blogosphere is alight and abuzz about Twitter, the not-so-new service that delivers status updates to all of your fans(and stalkers). Mathew Ingram makes an excellent point about Twitter- teenagers have been doing this for years(as long as I can remember using IM, in fact) with away messages, Facebook status updates and such. However, it’s not the fact that old fogeys like Robert Scoble have found out about it that is driving the sudden meteoric rise of Twitter. Rather, it’s the fact that popular old fogeys like Robert Scoble have discovered it. For those of us not as enamored with real-time updates on Jason Calacanis’ current weight as some bloggers, imagine if someone you truly were a huge fan of used Twitter. What if Angelina Jolie had a “status message” that detailed her current activities? Or, if that doesn’t float your boat, how about Richard Stallman?

That’s what’s really driving the Twitter mania. It is not by any means the technology or its Web 2.0 associations to “connecting people”. It is the cult of celebrity, except this time the A-list bloggers are the celebrities, showing once again just how incredibly powerful the blogosphere has become.

Update: See also my series on some of the cool “killer apps” for Freebase, which give a more hands-on demonstration:

The latest buzz on the Interwebs is Freebase. Tim O’Reilly gives a pretty good demo of the application, and the New York Times gives a decent overview for the layperson (complete with a picture of one of the founders in a stylish Creative Commons shirt). Personally, despite all of the criticism and fears that Freebase will create a super-intelligent AI that,lacking the imperfections of humanity, will destroy us all, I’m very excited about Freebase. It’s taking a huge step towards that ever-elusive semantic web. Basically, Freeweb is an attempt to tag and categorize all the world’s information. For years, technologists have tried in vain to create a semantic web for machines by using machines to organize information. Obviously, this failed miserably- our AI is just not up to the task. Freeweb takes the Mechanical Turk approach and taps into the power of people, the Internet community of millions to gather and organize its data. Read more »

Note: This post deals with a lot of pretty complex topics like education theory and cognitive psychology. Try to set all of that aside for now. I am not trying to suggest sweeping education reforms or drastic change- I am simply making a point about the disconnect between academia and the real world.

How do we learn?Broadly speaking, we learn in educational/classroom settings, and in real-world/self-taught settings. Setting aside all of the differences between those two, let us focus on one: the way information is delivered. Most of the time, classroom learning is theory-focused. You may learn specific skills, but always in the context of a general theory, a barrage of facts and ideas presented within the framework of several bigger concepts. Invariably, you will never use most of these ideas for the rest of your life. But, because you do not know exactly which units of knowledge acquired through classroom learning will be useful at some point later in life, you must learn them all. Does this strike anyone else as inefficient? Read more »