Alexa Versus Google.

Sorry, I couldn't resist that title.

With any luck, I'll have an Alexa account soon.
Assuming the data is comparable to Dejanews.com, I'll try re-activating the on-line Meme Miner as an instructional tool

Thanks to the Google versus Yahoo graph, tonight's simultaneous session count was awesome at 180+. Probably came close to crashing the Tomcat server, it crashed earlier this year when Yahoo hit it with 210 sessions in a fifteen minute period.

Google Versus Yahoo

Interesting frequency graph of the four major search engines.
It shows a change of leadership in the past year.

It's good for a laugh, at least. But it may be related to Yahoo's "buy" strategy versus Google's "build" strategy.

A key point here is that the search engine battle peaks in 2004 (for the sum of the four curves). This is typical of the frequency graphs in that they are often a leading indicator of future direction, sometimes by one to two years. 2006 may be a shake-out year.

As someone pointed out to me, even my own material mentions the growing inaccuracy of total Dejanews frequency counts since 2004, so it's probably not a good predictor of the overall search engine market.

But the leadership changeover, based on relative counts of Google versus Yahoo, is probably an indicator of a fundamental change.

Java vs LAMP vs Web 2.0

This year I've run graphs of Java, LAMP and Web 2.0 (with various filtering keywords), but this article at Slashdot inspired me to combine them all together in a log chart.

Comparison of actual counts:

Comparison of moving averages gives a better sense of rate of change:

I'm Beck In The USSR

Q: What would the world be like without Billy Beck on his weekly tirade?

A: Quiet and peaceful.

Please make it stop, God.

Advertising, Propaganda, Politics and Psychological Warfare

What do advertising, propaganda, politics and psychological warfare have in common?

They adopt an ideological goal, measure a baseline of cultural beliefs, then engage in a campaign to achieve that goal through the change of beliefs.

Their methodologies are primarily focused on the goal, and the mechanism of change is a secondary consideration. But suppose we reverse the sequence.

Suppose we focused on the mechanism of change first?

We could treat this diagram as a class hierarchy with a superclass of "Memetics".

Schramm & the Attention Crisis

I came across the "attention crisis" last week, so I ran a quick graph to test for inflection.
I got two surprises:

1) The "attention crisis" meme peaked over a year ago.

2) I was probably influenced by the meme, but I have no memory of it.

It seems more than coincidental that the "attention crisis" was in its second wave as I began writing up this Schramm snippet.
And I've been wanting to run something that proxies the effectivness of the RealMeme.com website, so I ran this:

I first put the Schramm content up around July, 2004, but the site wasn't search-engine friendly and I didn't use any explicit meme strategies. Although this graph is circumstantial evidence, I think the second site spawned the Schramm wave which follows a few months later.

This may be a circular example of a meme spawning a child, then the child respawning its parent.

Notes On Having A Website

It confirms that your neighbors, coworkers and bosses really do spread malicious rumors behind your back, sometimes two or three States away!

Yeah, I think this is a Fenix night.

I'm fascinated by the way... you... make... me... feel.

Notes on the Ideosphere, Part II

The search behavior of Dejanews.com changes in late 2004, characterized by sharp spikes and valleys in previously linear functions. This implies that until even this year, Google management was unaware of the value of time-series data, probably introducing some methodology change to Dejanews that compromised its time-series value.

In other words, Google is probably late in the game to aggregate data research.
I'd bet on IBM over Google, myself, but I always liked Sun over Microsoft.

These oscillations now show up in many queries which return large counts (10K+).

I compensate by adding roughly neutral keywords (such as "blog read" instead of "blog") to reduce the result size and minimize the skew.

It's even possible that Google has maintained a poor history of their historical search data, seeing as the search engines (and the entire Internet) are uniquely American in that they focus only on the present.

RSS feeds versus Usenet hierarchy - I think the percentage bet is that the RSS feeds won't easily duplicate the predictive abilty of Usenet time series. The RSS feeds are spontaneously created at the user level, there's got to be a lot of duplication (which compromises the accuracy of histographs) and problems with synchronized taxonomy definitions. The centralized management of Usenet prevented these type of problems.

But somebody should already have those answers. I can't believe that Technorati hasn't run time-series graph on their data, unless they're not capturing historical data either. Hard to imagine.

Dejanews works well for technology memes because their lifetime tends to be in the 4-5 year range and Deja maintains good linearity over that range. But we'd really like to get a handle on long-term cultural memes. You'd need a multi-dimensional sentiment map, something far beyond "good versus evil". You'd probably a measure of cultural homogeneity, a broader definition of the impedance measurement.

The "Attention Crisis". Okay, now it has an official name. I didn't hype the concept enough last year to get credit for it.

Notes on the Ideosphere

Terminology is important.
We should be more exacting.

Ideospace - the biological hardware, the finite supply of human brain power & memory.
Ideosphere - the biological software, the set of all memes in circulation.

The growth rate of the measurable Ideosphere, data aggregates transmitted through the Internet, is part illusion. The Internet is slowly opening a window onto the pre-existing Ideosphere, creating an illusion of growth. But it does seem highly likely that the Ideosphere is gaining greater diversity over time, for various reasons. (to be detailed later).

I've tried to deskew Dejanews memegraphs with poor results. I've concluded that the ideospace of Dejanews is an expanding, cone-shaped 3-dimensional space where simple 2-dimension deskewing methods fail, because they cross-cut different areas with different gradients and determinants. (We need a better graphic for this)

The expanding cone represents the expanding diversity of the newsgroup hierarchy. One of the critical arguments against the methodology is the inherent skew from growing usage. However, I believe that this expanding diversity is a rough counterbalance to volume growth (i.e. actual total messages in Dejanews), and that this counterbalance is a natural force which accounts for the effectiveness of the awkwardly contrived 2-d data slices of the memegraphs.

In other words, the DENSITY of the cone remains roughly constant, as it is a function of diversity-to-message volume.

Why do I care?
What is the relevance of the revelation?

Well, for one thing, it implies some sort of natural law that keeps diversity and volume balanced,
and that law may be equally applicable (and measurable) with RSS feeds which are displacing usenet.

If it does apply, it implies equally simple methods of data extraction from RSS.

What that implies is quick arbitrage of the information, which means its value will fall quickly.

Which implies that a good portion of the remaining value will go to the company or university that develops effective 3-d deskewing methodologies for extracting marginal value from the bulk RSS feeds, so they could get a handle on doing it now and beat out everyone else.

Back to diversity. Usenet represents a certain level of diversity via a flooding algorithm.
The blogs, however, are an entirely animal, they represent almost a subscription model, which is a better use of bandwidth,
which may account for the Darwinian encroachment of blogs upon Usenet. It's also a devolution of management scale and precision. Usenet hierarchy, regardless of hype, is still a centralized hieararchy which has to be distributed and maintained.

Again, why do I care about this?

Because we want to know if the Context & Ideosphere model is correct.

If the displacement of Usenet was pre-ordained by the growing delta of ideosphere versus total information, then we have two future outcomes - either blogs themselves are pre-ordained for replacement, or the delta stops growing.

StumbleUpon.com Meme

Pre-inflection point graph.
An interesting site, described to me as "collaborative web filtering".

Context, Ideosphere & the Internet

Some expanded ideas about context from the Schramm diagram.

When Jack & Jill's contexts are identical, transaction costs are minimized.
Like an insect colony, there is no disagreement on terminology or goals, so work is maximized.
But people are not insects, so what happens as contexts diverge?

Transaction costs are directly proportional to the great American goal of "diversity".
More diversity means more transactions, more errors and more conflicts.

Now let's look at "context" as a function of the Ideosphere over time.
The domain of the Ideosphere is the sum of all human consciousness;
its growth rate is directly proportional to the growth rate of people.

But the sum of all information is rising at an exponential rate.

For each "bucket" (human mind) in the Ideosphere, there are more items to fill a fixed amount of space.
How do you fit more information into the same space?

You remove duplications by replacing peer-to-peer structures with hierarchical structures (oligopolies), which has a direct bearing on "context". Some duplication is necessary for balance. The graph below shows how information structures are changing under the rising pressure.

Each revision of electronic media is diffusing to hold the rising delta of information which exceeds ideosphere capacity.
Extrapolating from this, you might predict that jobs based solely on specialization of information will be created as long as the delta continues growing.

Middle East North Africa Broadband Services

I had my first downloads from Mena Broadband this week.
My traffic from Middle Eastern countries was exceedingly rare until last month.

Reading through Mena's homepage, I was surprised to see that they're satellite-based.
Didn't fit my preconceptions of Arab countries, I suppose.

But then it occurred to me that there's some substantial opportunity here;
an interesting nexus of infrastructure development (extreme mobility, ipv6, Internet2); interesting cultural and memetic interactions; money and resources to make it happen.

I think I could make an argument that widespread Internet availability is a force for defusing cultural problems, using Schramm's concepts of context and meme propagation.

IBM E-Business Patterns

IBM e-business SOA pattern redbook.
It's surprisingly good; a small, well-defined set of interacting patterns that are easy to learn and useful in real-life work.

I90 - Bellevue to Seattle

I walked the I90 bridges, from Bellevue Square to downtown Seattle, about 12 miles total.

I did go to the Cirque Du Noc ball on Saturday, but seeing as I'm a total stranger,
taking pictures didn't seem entirely appropriate. The crowd was about half the size
of what I expected; apparently their livejournals' bark is worse than their bite.

Overdriving - Breitbart Revisited

An electronic transistor normally outputs a sine wave signal. But a transistor can be overloaded by too much input, resulting in a "clipped" sine wave and signal distortion.

Look at the Breitbart memegraph again.
The initial spike is almost vertical.

I've run hundreds of these graphs.
This is an unusual rate of change.

Memes have a velocity restriction on how fast they'll travel through the ideosphere, determined by a myriad of factors. And I know from personal experience that the curve of an overdriven meme differs from the standard s-curve of a "natural meme". It's possible to temporarily hype a meme by spamming email, newsgroups and blogs with inappropriate links, but then the meme quickly fades out.

I think it's likely that this is the result of a deliberate and unusual marketing strategy, and that the breitbart meme will look like an overdriven meme by summer of 2006.