Sam Arbesman has written up an initial analysis (PDF file) of the results of the Memespread Project. In discussing the spread of memes, it's common practice to utilize familiar biological terms: viral, epidemic, contagious, incubation, etc. My favorite quote of the article along those lines is "Jason Kottke is an informational equivalent of Typhoid Mary". Heh. But in this case, MetaFilter turned out more Mary than I:
What seemed most interesting is that the largest spike occurred 10 hours into the experiment, and was due to the website MetaFilter (http://www.metafilter.com). The spread of the meme to this collaborative blog seemed to help give the epidemic another wave of spreading (as can be seen in Figure 5 and Figure 1).
Because of its greater traffic, MeFi exposed more people to the meme than did kottke.org. And I suspect that due to the different audiences of the two sites, the meme was probably also more virulent among MeFi readers than kottke.org readers; that is, MeFi readers were more likely to infect others with the meme than were those of kottke.org.
It would be interesting to run this experiment again under slightly different conditions. Maybe seed a bigger node in the network (MeFi instead of kottke.org). Or seed 50 sites at the same time, each with a different meme marked with a distinct tracking code (e.g. www.example.com/?id=47) and see how each one spreads. Maybe the memes could be mutable; creating a new strain would be as easy as adding a couple digits to the tracking ID.
People have been asking (not really), so I thought I'd let you know that MetaFilter, Megnut, and A Whole Lotta Nothing are down because of a bad computer fan. No ETA as of yet on when the box will be back up. Matt Haughey was unavailable for comment due to laziness on my part, but if he were available, he'd probably say something like, "you tell those ungrateful bastards that I'll order that new fan when I'm damn good and ready."
Update: Matt clues us in about the recent outage at status.metafilter.com.
Just went to MetaFilter today after not reading it for a month and a half. "There have been 1495 links and 41191 comments posted since your last visit." By my extremely rough calculations**, the members of MeFi produce the equivalent of one and a half 150-page books each day.
That sound you just heard was me clicking the window close button on my browser as fast as I could. If I'm going to be reading a book and a half a day, I'm thinking something from my bookshelf would be more worth my while.
** 250 words/page X 150 pages/book = 37,500 words/book
22,661 posts/month X 80 words/post / 31 days/month = approx. 58,500 words/day
Mefi stats source: waxy.org Mefi stats (Oct 2002) and a little Perl magic by Andy to get the words/post number.
Peter notes, among other things, J.C. Herz's 4 types of gamers that she outlined in her Etech presentation last week. I wrote the same four points down in my notes in a slightly different way:
1. beat the system
2. model the system
3. run the system
4. kill the system
J.C.'s point was that you can look at software, online communities, and Web sites in the same way. Players in those systems break down into similar groups. MeFi is a great example...you see folks exhibiting all four of those behaviors. In most situations, as much as I get caught up in beating a system (which I shouldn't do because I'm not very good at it most of the time), I'm a system modeller. I'm much more interested in finding out how the system works than beating it.
Today's mini-interview is with Nick Sweeney. You might say Nick has been around the block once or twice when it comes to online culture and community. He's got what the kids call "perspective".
Q: You've spent a significant amount of time participating on Plastic and MetaFilter, both prominent online community sites. Anything you can tell us about the differences between the two?
A: Actually, I wouldn't call myself a 'participant' in Plastic, which is probably an advantage: as one of the editors (although I'm speaking strictly for myself here), I'm meant to be both 'outside looking in' and 'inside looking out'. It's an interesting contrast to my time at MetaFilter, to say the least.
The editorial element is the biggest difference, of course. It's an attempt to introduce a kind of horticulture to the community's growth: to weed out the duplicates and the flames and the links to the Usual Suspects, and introduce a kind of distance to the slavish news/meme cycle which so often cripples MeFi these days. I think it's a smart way to manage communities that have reached the size and stage of evolution that Plastic's at right now. And the discussions from users within the submission queue are a great way to assess how a submission comes across.
I still check MeFi on occasion for the same reasons I read Wired magazine: the occasional piece inspires nostalgia; and I'd read many of its contributors, regardless of the forum. In its heyday, the erudition and diversity of knowledge on MeFi always went well beyond anything I've seen on Plastic. It's not quite as 'group-smart' now, simply because seminar-size discussions don't scale to lecture theatres.
Matt's always been very trusting towards his membership, and in general, receives the respect that's deserved by such trust. I can't help thinking that it doesn't accommodate 13,000-odd members: partly because the times don't lend themselves to seminar-style discussion; partly because you're dealing with the friction between oldbies and newbies, and their different conceptions of what the place is, was, and should be. 'Member memory' is a vital aspect of community sites, even ones which profess to deal with the transient meme-feed, and I think it's much stronger at MeFi than Plastic: so that when you have members who take perhaps two years' worth of discussion into the day's discussion up against new arrivals, it's bound to create the same kind of frustrations as a USENET September.
[ For comparison's sake, you can see something of that frustration with Slashdot, which, though working from a somewhat similar codebase to Plastic, has ceased to be a community for anyone with a long memory of the place, given that most discussions are essentially 'read-only' within hours of stories going live. That said, MeFi still retains an implicit quality threshold, with its emphasis on providing supporting links and challenging easy polarisations. (Whether that rule's honoured more now in the breach than the observance is another thing entirely.) ]
Plastic doesn't quite yet seem suited towards that kind of discussion: there's still an instinctive tendency towards raw opinioneering and snarkiness, though that's definitely changing. And you can't impose intellectual discipline on a community: it has to come from within. (Although as a plain old poster to Plastic, I do try to set a half-decent example.) What's bizarre is that Plastic is the one with the moderation system. But perhaps that's because moderation tends to favour both the well-considered posts and the cheap shots.
What I do like about Plastic is the way in which the mechanical aspects of the site -- that is, the combination of submission, peer review and moderation -- tend to promote a climate that's suited to media literacy. And because the more trollish or flamebaiting submissions don't make it past the queue, you'll get topics that create space for people to address in more nuanced ways than the 'partisan tennis' of an unmoderated system. (For instance, there was a recent well-regarded submission on school funding, property taxation and racism which turned into a fine discussion.) It's that kind of thing that I hope (and expect) Plastic can continue to support. ::end
What would happen if you split MeFi into two "teams", each a community of its own?
Note: Many of these links are broken. One of these days, I'm going to clean them up as much as I can. -jkottke, 5/27/02
Some reports from the scene, in NY:
- eyewitness video of 2nd plane crashing into WTC
(fast mirror @ apple, mirror01, mirror02, mirror03, mirror04 (de))
- First-hand photos of someone fleeing the WTC and the aftermath. Amazing stuff.
- Video of the second plane crash (if you look carefully, you can see the plane approaching from the left)
- eerie time lapse of both towers burning and collapsing
(mirror01)
- photo of plane just before it hit WTC #2
- amazing photo of second plane crash taken by an amateur photographer
- some photos on Ultradio (almost artistic)
- Blogger search for "World Trade"
- Sara Schwittek (pix)
- Poignant cartoon by Tom Tomorrow
- Super Hyper Demon Child (scroll for pix)
- MetaFilter thread (w/pix)
- some pictures of tower collapsing
- Planet Kevin (pix)
- Animus Rex (pix)
- John C. Glass (pix, especially this and this)
- The Fine Line (text and pix)
- Like an orb (pix)
- Steve Riskus (pix in DC seconds after the Pentagon crash)
- Lackadaisical (pix)
- Lightning Field (w/pix)
- toothpickgirl (w/pix)
- guns media (pix)
- wireless NY (pix)
- Place Name Here (pix)
- Before pictures of the WTC by Dale Sorenson (pix)
- Missing Pieces @ {fray}.
- Lots of first-hand accounts on this Slashdot thread
- lots of stories from stinky.com
- potkettleblack in DC
- Brian Bernstein (in-building acct.)
- The Tin Man
- Netwert IdeaPad
- Exegesis
- Dirt Dirt
- Broadwaystars.com
- primenumber.com in DC
- CamWorld
- pic on momus
- Michelle in DC
- allenplummer.com
- Saranwarp
- Mr. Barrett
- Q Daily News
- World New York
- bgirl
Misc. Stuff
- Some links about talking to children about crisis and trauma
- lots of video from the day (very fast and high bandwidth connection)
- Check to see if people are OK in NY
- A chronology of what happened from CNN
- a design piece from testpilotcollective
- Tara has a resource page up at Research Buzz
Some personal thoughts (I want to get these down to read later):
- I have no context for this. Challenger times 1000. Comparable to Pearl Harbor, but I didn't live thru that.
- All this talk of America vs. the world by our politicians is making me sick and uneasy. This is a human issue, not an American, democracy, or a freedom issue. Someone attacked us all, all of us on the Good Earth.
- I'm so scared right now. I don't want to hear any reports of Americans grabbing the nearest Arab and beating the crap out of him or her. Don't do it. Please.
- Some people cope by hearing and distributing information in a crisis. I'm one of those people, I guess. Makes me feel like I'm doing something useful for those that can't do anything. Or something.
- I'm planning on travelling by air twice in the next month, one flight overseas. I'm not so sure now.
