MemeTracker

i subscribe, by rss
to a handful of
del.icio.us tags
like 'googlebase'

that very occasionally
deliver something useful
but mostly just
repeat and repeat
as multiple posters
rediscover the same
page/meme

and similarly, i consider
how memes recur in waves
passed around
forgotten
rediscovered
passed around again

so imagine
what you'd have to add
to delicious
or to technorati, etc
to track this

a database
not just of urls, but of
identical, or just comparable
content-items
that may appear under
many different urls

that may trace an evolving story

that will have a meta-history
of who linked when

and will have tags
that may evolve, themselves
as the meme's appeal evolves

(eg new parody reviving interest
in old original inspiration)

so you can do a background check
on a meme that's new to you
and easily see where it's been
and how to frame it best...

Human factors on the Tree of Life

by substituting radial
concentric circles
for a triangular hierarchy
in imagining my universal ontology

i gain the significant dimension of
distance from the center

which i mapped first
onto how common, in the real world
a given story-concept was

and second onto how
simple or complex

but now i want to re-map
that significant dimension

onto how much cost
or how much benefit

the realization of a story
would cost or benefit
the story-realizer

so in the 'benefits view'
stories with small benefit
will lie closer to the center
and stories with great benefit
farther out

and in the costs-view
small costs are close
and great costs farther out

and planning
means finding cost-stories
that lead to greater-benefit stories




now when a designer refines a tool

the goal is to maximize benefits
and minimize costs

and in software tools
the costs are mostly linear
sequences of keyclicks and mouseclicks

and when good design
makes a benefit cheaply accessible
for the first time
via a series of cost-clicks
below some unknown threshold

you have a killer app

a visicalc
a mosaic
an itunes

Analysis and ontology

i'd like to elevate
the humble html tag
<ul>
(unordered list)
to a post of honor
in the philosophical realm

where i'll re-dub it
'analysis'
after a rule of thumb
that emerged as i compiled
my timeline of knowledge representation

where i found that
any domain of knowledge
could be advanced
by proposing an
unordered list
of components of that domain

ie, an analysis

which lists i tried to quote
as illustrations
for the timeline




so a hierarchy is built of
nested
analyses

and an ontology is a hierarchy
that tries to span a domain

but all universal ontologies
are failures
because complex composites
can't follow
a simple hierarchical analysis

Musical barcode?

suppose you wanted
to scan, by eye
100 songs you'd never heard

looking for ones you might like

so you'd need a way to represent
their Pandora-style 'musical DNA'
as patterns of color

like: a rectangle
that's longer if the song is longer

that has a pink stripe
where there's female vocals
blue for male
lightcolored for sweetvocals
dark for harsh

closespaced vertical stripes
for fast-beat parts
wide for slow

subtle rhythms
distinguished, somehow
from ordinary ones

some kind of repeating symbol
for looping sequences

something messy for glitchy

primary colors for ordinary harmonies
bluesy colors for bluesy harmonies
subtle for subtle...?

Transparent things on the Tree of Life

Nabokov:

"When we concentrate on a
material object, whatever its situation,
the very act of attention may lead
to our involuntarily sinking
into the history of that object."

a human branch eyes an object

at one thin layermoment

an imaginary line drawn
between eye and object

and the human's radial ontology
lighting up
with stories about that object

stories it's incarnating
in the present
or may incarnate
in the future

or may have incarnated
in the past
(whence N warns)