Social Networking Meme Verified

Original Analysis with Meme Miner

Meme Miner detected the peak of the "social networking" meme several months ago. Google's Trends tool confirms a top in "social networking" in August, 2006. Blogpulse.com still shows a rising meme for now, but...

I suspect that Blogpulse's data lags the other two tools and I'll see if I can verify and measure the lag time.

Today's Mystery Guest

209.133.64.213 - - [04/Oct/2006:16:02:32 -0400] "GET /roller/page/realmeme?entry=ipv6_meme_flatlined_for_five HTTP/1.1" 200 18491 "-" "MSRBOT (http://research.microsoft.com/research/sv/msrbot/)"

Hey!
Make me a job offer!

Googly Ayes

Okay, I successfully gamed

G @ @ G L E

and provoked the Sogou Spider into several thousand hits per day from China. My bandwidth is up six-fold... over 12K hits today so far.

It's meaningless, really, but I get a kick out of it.
I do "grandiose" right!

Our House

I sat at the bar and realized that my Idaho house would have been paid for in another year or two. Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if I hadn't trusted the Boise State Decepticons in '96, if I had stayed in Denver. My education about "provincial", "conspiracy" and "yokel" is good now, but I paid too much for it.

The first pool table was occupied by loud salespeople dressed in slacks and ties. A biker sat down next to me; late forties with ragged, graying hair, so call him Sam Elliot. Sam assumed I was part of the sales group and he wanted to complain about Bush and Iraq.

I didn't.

But Sam insisted. I watched the game in silence as he complained to the air, then he finally lost patience with my lack of attention -

Sam: "Hey, how would YOU like to be a foot soldier in Iraq?"
Me: "I don't care about it"

Sam: "What?! What if your kids were getting killed in Iraq?"
Me: "It has nothing to do with me"

Sam: "Don't you see what's happening?"
Sam: "Aren't you worried about the country's future?"

He had a point.
I gave it some serious thought and then I realized...

Me: "No. Not much."

I used to, but I paid too much for it.

Sam's eyes widened and he leaned back. He sat in stunned silence for awhile, I guess. Then in a quiet tone, he invited me to a friend's party with "the right stuff", but I had to promise to be cordial and discreet. I politely shrugged it off and he left a few minutes later.

I wonder about a future where my Idaho house is paid for. But more often, I wonder what Australia is like. Or Uruguay. Or Argentina. I've wondered for years, of course, but my circumstances are far different now than in 2003.

Expanded Notes On The Ideosphere, Part 3

Ideosphere Theory: the space where thoughts, theories and ideas are... created, evaluated and evolved.

Ideosphere Diagram

Notes On The Ideosphere, Part 1

Notes On The Ideosphere, Part 2

I wanted to create an outline of the Ideosphere, a cultural fingerprint, then extrapolate actions that could alter the map in predictable ways, i.e. develop an empirical system to modify cultural beliefs. A grandiose scheme that I didn't believe I could achieve, but perhaps I could lay out some foundation stones and provoke others to evolve it.

But I see now that the foundation and the cultural map are two separate pieces. There are two inklings for a foundation -

1) The Ideosphere bandwidth is bounded along an axis of "branded versus unbranded". "Unbranded" bandwidth seeks new memes while "branded" preserves existing memes to reduce total transaction costs. I suspect that large swaths of bandwidth are dedicated towards one extreme or the other and can not be re-allocated. If so, then the boundaries of "new memes" versus "existing memes" shouild be predictable, as well as the point of bandwidth saturation.

2) The Ideosphere bandwidth may also be bounded along an axis of Emotional versus Rational thought. Assume that, on average, emotional thought is a constant, therefore rational thought is a constant (Rational + Emotional = Total). Emotional thought may be subdivided up into anger, happiness, fear, etc. The sum of all emotions is constant, but the mix of emotions may change.

These foundation areas can be researched and expanded.
The cultural mapping sits on top of this foundation.

Lying in bed, just like Brian Wilson did

Today's Mystery Guest

Maybe it's because of the traffic I'm getting from the Russian front company in Los Angeles, or the daily spiders from China and China.

Incognito NOT

If you want to surf anonymously, at least change your Safari signature.

216.127.72.7 - - [30/Sep/2006:13:46:43 -0400] "GET /roller/page/realmeme?entry=click_n_cloak HTTP/1.0" 200 14521 "http://realmeme.com/roller/" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/125.2.2 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/125.8"

216.127.72.7 - - [01/Oct/2006:22:46:34 -0400] "GET /roller/theme/layout.css HTTP/1.0" 200 770 "http://realmeme.com/roller/" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.23; Mac_PowerPC)"

EGAD!!!! (smacking my hand to my forehead)

You swapped one unique signature for another unique signature.
This is the ONLY Mac_PowerPC I've seen.
What the hell!

Audrey

Audrey kissed me last night. She kissed me twice. Audrey is easily the most beautiful woman that's ever laid hands on me. Lead Actress beautiful. "Cover Girl" beautiful.

She was dressed in that pseudo-military camoflage style that's fashionable; A twenty-year old Sophia Loren in a camo cap and tight camo shorts with black lace-up, knee-high combat boots. I was on my cellphone when she walked by and said "hello". But she was too young, a man was with her and I was on my phone, so I waved back and turned around.

I ran into her again at the Central so I introduced myself, we talked a bit and then suddenly she grabbed my hair with both hands, leaned forward and kissed me on one cheek. Then she kissed the other cheek. She stepped back and giggled, "I'm Italian, that's how we greet people".

Once again, I was too shocked to say much. Up close, though, I saw that she was older than I first thought, perhaps in her early thirties. And then her friend yanked her away and out the door.

--

And I'm off to Portland again.

Anger Meme Revisited

Methodology

Previous Results

A comparison of the three graphs implies that "angry" is probably a rising meme.

I re-ran my queries for "Angry Meme", but I also ran "Happy" as a counterpoint to uncover skews which may exist in the methodology or data of Google Trends or Blogpulse.com. A downside of these tools is the limited historical data (3 years and 6 months, respectively). I also ran the "angry" and "happy" queries on Meme Miner for a better historical perspective, but keep in mind that the Dejanews methodology for counting large data sets changed in 2004, so I'm cautious of the memegraphs after 2004.

The "Angry" Meme

--

--

The "Happy" Meme

I ran the "happy" meme as a counterpoint to "angry". If there is an upward (or downward) skew, it should be reflected in the "happy" as well as the "angry" meme. The "happy" meme is declining in two of the three graphs. The third graph (from Meme Miner/Dejanews) shows a minor recent uptrend, but an overall decline in happy over the past two years! I'm not sure how to interpret the results for the Dejanews graph.

--

--

He Shoots, He Scores!

Who is the master?! Sho-nuff!

My test worked.

Run this google query and check the #1 entry. Now run most of the combinations of a weapon and a location that I published this week.

Damn, I can't believe it worked.
---

I think about her every day.

My summer girl

One Night In Kirkland

Two men next to me, in their mid-thirties, ordered another round; a martini and a cosmo. They exuded too much confidence, too much swagger, and then my guess was confirmed.

They were "real estate investors".

But not just ordinary investors, they were "foreclosure experts". I did a quick calculation. Mr. Kojak was about twenty during the last real estate bust and his buddy was even younger. Conclusion? Tactically proficient and strategically clueless.

Kojak bragged about his conquest of the week, a "$330K property" that he picked up for $280K. The long island made me mischievous so I pulled his chain -

"What happens if the value falls below $280K?"

He blinked and shook his shaven head, "I've been doing this for almost ten years, it won't happen."

"Haven't you read anything about the housing crash?"

He smiled, "Yeah, sure, but Seattle is different. It won't happen here."

---

Fast forward to the next real estate investors of my night, two Canadians on a business trip. Woody Harrelson nodded as I explained my thoughts on currencies.

Woody: "What about real estate?"
Woody: "I've got a property in Denver I'm trying to sell"

Me: "Denver is a hard call"
Me: "It's already been depressed for so long"

Woody: "I dropped the price 10% this week"
Woody: "That's below what I paid in 2004"

Me: "I hope you can sell it"
Me: "There might be a dead-cat bounce in the next 6-9 months"

Woody: "I've been all over Europe"
Woody: "You're the first American I've met who thinks like a European"

Okay, so now I'm insulted. But I answer him anyway -

Me: "What do you mean?"

Woody: "No Americans think that America has serious financial problems"
Woody: "But most Europeans expect America to collapse soon"

--

It turned out that Woody made a fair chunk during the Dot Com crash on currency trading, close to a million bucks, but he sank most of it into real estate (like everybody else, I suppose).

He may have lingered a little too long at the fair.

Conformity versus Diversity

My favorite topic!

Quote from "Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany " book review -

"Many ordinary Germans actively participated in this process, denouncing neighbors as "asocial" elements for associating with Jews or for "suspicious" activities. Denunciations derived from a variety of motivations personal grudges, economic self-interest, or ideological commitment with the full knowledge of what would happen to the victims"

Dynamic systems tend to oscillate between conformity and diversity because each extreme has competitive advantages for certain situations. It's not surprising that post-Depression Germany embarked on a path of maximum conformity because its opposite, diversity, is strongly associated with additional economic costs, i.e. transaction costs.

It is also not surprising (to me) that the U.S. seems headed towards a morass of many defensive, provincial sub-cultures focused on self-promotion at the expense of all other groups (balkanization).

I've seen so much of this behavior in the past few years, even preceding the Dot Com crash. Perhaps I was naive or inattentive, but I don't remember such blatant discrimination, subterfuge, hidden agendas or secret alliances, etc, prior to 1991. I was raised in Los Angeles, a city which was successful because the great majority of citizens weren't beholden to small, short-sighted cabals.

Evolution Of The IT Market

I presented this concept towards the end of my 2005 Defcon presentation. The IT Market can be considered, in gestalt, as being an S-curve market with the year 2000-2001 ( the Dot Com Crash ) as its inflection point...

As the 2001 inflection point approached, the IT industry was increasingly focused on mass market products and standards - modem protocols, Windows, TCP/IP, email, etc. A broader consumer audience created economies of scale for high-volume products and services.

But in the post-Crash world, profit margins on mass-produced products have fallen. Niche markets with high profit margins are sought after, but many companies still upgrade legacy products for decreasing profit margins (Oracle, Microsoft come to mind). The IT market is still in a slow-motion shakeout period, but I suspect that few IT workers believe it.

My own survival focus has been to track the growth rate of technologies, determine how viable and profitable they are, and move into the best bets. My current bets are SOA and Business Process Analysis...

Anger Meme Refined

This is a refinement of the Anger Meme. After a little experimentation, I discovered that the adjective "angry" is more representative than "anger" of informal conversation. The Google Trends and BlogPulse.com graphs for "angry" show a significant uptrend -

Anger Meme

From blogpulse.com, a more sophisticated trend tracking tool -

Taken from The Seven Deadly Sins

See the uptick in "anger"? I wondered how the housing crash was impacting societal mood so I ran this query. I didn't expect an increase, but perhaps "anger" will keep increasing as the housing debacle unfolds.

Look at "anger", then look at the other 6 deadly sins. See how the others show minor decreases relative to increases in "pride" and "anger"? If we could parse out all keywords and phrases related to human moods, I believe it would be a zero-sum bandwidth, that is, a net increase in one mood (anger, for instance) has a matching decrease in other moods. If the Ideosphere has finite bandwidth, then it stands to reason that the sub-bandwidth for emotions is finite, too.