Neomeme

Forget the privacy-infringing, faux-not-evil Google Beast. The real beast, growing rapidly and devouring everything in its path, is Facebook. Facebook huge right now. Super-huge. Almost Google-huge. CEO-bitch “CEO,bitch” Mark Zuckerberg is hailed as a modern-day DaVinci. Even old fogeys like Robert Scoble are transitioning to Facebook, because it’s as cool as iPhone. A cottage industry, complete with eager VCs has sprung up around Facebook Applications, and startups rise and fall on Facebook apps alone.

And now, Facebook is jumping into the acqusistions game, buying up a startup before it even launches and outbidding Google. When you outbid Google’s billion-dollar cash reserves, you ‘re not fooling around. You mean business. Read more »

In another effort to combat allegations that top Digg users are abusing the system, Digg founder Kevin Rose announced that Digg will no longer rank its top users. Frankly, I don’t see how anything good can come of this. The top users will continue to be visible as dominating the front page as long as their username is associated with submissions, and other diggers can see that the same people are submitting front-page stories continuously. The exact numerical rankings are meaningless. Even worse, the removal of the rankings takes a way a key element of the Digg experience- the game, the rat race to the top, the same reason gamers will play repetitive games for hours and hours on end to get to the high score tables. The incentive of high rank is suddenly stripped away, and many top users feel robbed of the fruit of their labors. As can be expected, some of the top users are not happy. Read more »

If you haven’t noticed, I’ve added a MyBlogLog widget to the right sidebar. So far, I’m extremely happy with it. There’s a good reason many top bloggers use it, and Yahoo recently bought it for a cool $10 mil. So far, I’m liking it. A lot. It adds a whole new dynamic to blogging and, if you excuse the cliche, pushes blogging the rest of the way into Web 2.0. MyBlogLog adds a whole new dimension of interactivity to blogging, because it lets the blogger connect with readers he probably didn’t know he had. Because all readers with MyBlogLog accounts have blogs of their own, a dialogue of comments can commence. Before I started blogging, I did not read any blogs regularly, and, like most Internet users, I restricted blog visits to happenstance Google search results. Now, I have discovered over a half-dozen blogs I frequent, mostly through comments and trackbacks on my own blog, as well as top posts from Wordpress.com. MyBlog Log greatly increases a blogger’s exposure to other bloggers with similar interests,blogging topics, and readers. Over time, MyBlogLog really does foster “community” as familiar faces, all with distinct personalities and opinions reappear each others’ blogs. The potential for MyBlogLog is amazing- I look forward to exploring the novel communites of interesting, real people it spontaneously creates.

I wish I got paid to write this post. But sadly I’m only genuinely enthusiastic,mostly because “celebrity” bloggers have at least briefly glimpsed my blog. Hooray!

Web Worker Daily has an interesting post about how new web services like Amazon S3 are redefining the web development landscape by providing easy-to-use, commoditized web services. Web Worker Daily hails this as a step towards a sunny future where ” a non-programmer with a regular-sized wallet can come up with an idea for a web-based business and put it together himself from pieces available on the web.” Fuck. Can you imagine the cesspool of shit the Web will become if every average Joe thinks himself a web developer? We will be overrun by hundreds, nay thousands of inferior clones, buggy applications and poorly executed concepts. Just look at all of the many hundreds of Digg clones out there. Do 99% of them contribute anything to the Internet community? Do they create any value for users? No, they don’t. We have already glimpsed the sheer horror(warning:don’t click if you have epilepsy) that Myspace created when it convinced average web surfers they were qualified to be web designers. Now imagine, if your mind can handle it, a thousand Gmails, a thousand Wordpresses, a thousand Flickrs, most with that same awful design not only on the frontend but also on the backend. An email service that loses all of your emails because the creator, an average Joe who is completely unfamiliar with the principles of good programming, forgot to drag in the “Backup” widget. Or a web service with broken links not in HTML, as many poorly coded, typo-ridden websites have now, but in relational databases. Read more »

Explaining the name of this blog(in response to multiple questions), and also stumbling upon its purpose. Not bad:

I came across this lengthy yet fascinating post about memes today. It’s very well-researched and thought provoking, and definitely worth a read. Coincidentally, the same day I completed Metal Gear Solid 2, which adresses much of the same topics and came across this in-depth analysis of its multilayered ending. The concept of the Internet meme, as the term is used in this blog, is nothing new. Even Scoble has written about memes. A meme, as used here, is simply a single intangible unit of information. Digital technology redefines memes because anyone can create and distribute one with unprecendeted ease.

Armed with all of this reading, I have finally come up with a single summary, a mission statement for this blog: The purpose of this blog is to explore the new kinds of memes the Internet and other emerging technologies create, and how they morph and travel in an increasingly social digital world.
The idea will be approached. Occasionally, unrelated content will slip in- this is my only blog, after all. But, overall, whether it’s instructions how to create a single piece of digital information(a password) or game a memetracker(digg), future posts will lie at least somewhat tangent to that topic, looking in at it through the lenses of tech, philosohy, psychology or, my favorite, social experiment. Quite a few interesting ideas I have yet to commit to (digital) paper, so stay tuned.

Well, now that the Digg effect has mostly subsided, and as I prepare for my inevitable descent from being the #1 blog and post on Wordpress.com, I think it’s high time for another post. This time: How to coast to the front page of Digg. Now, to be fair, with only three front page stories, I can’t exactly be considered the authority on getting to the Digg front page. And, as you can see by my record of submissions, I have a record of failing 88% of the time. Nice, but 12% is a better success ratio than most venture capitalists. All the same, I think I’ve found a few dirty, underhanded, scoundrelly tricks to hit the Digg front page. I’m guilty of using a couple of these myself, of course, but they don’t violate the Digg TOS, and rest comfortably in that ethical grey area we’ve all come to love. Note that these tricks can apply to other social news sites, and indeed advertising in general, but the focus here is on Digg, as the original and most popular social news site. Here we go:

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My last post was about how the value of social news sites, and social networks as a whole. Right now, all social networks are based on a democratic, almost communist model. Everyone is equal, everyone is worth the same. It makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside just thinking of my own value. Unfortunately, historically, pure democracy has never worked, what with the majority of the population being stupid, gullible sheep and whatnot.

So, how do we fix vote-driven site? Simple. Turn the democracy into a republic.

Read more »