Hat tip: The AP in Salon.

This posting is a community experiment that tests how a meme, represented by this blog posting, spreads across blogspace, physical space and time. It will help to show how ideas travel across blogs in space and time and how blogs are connected. It may also help to show which blogs (and aggregation sites) are most influential in the propagation of memes. The dataset from this experiment will be public, and can be located via Google (or Technorati) by doing a search for the GUID for this meme (below).

The original posting for this experiment is located at: Minding the Planet (Permalink: http://novaspivack.typepad.com/nova_spivacks_weblog/2004/08/a_sonar_ping_of.html) — results and commentary will appear there in the future.

Please join the test by adding your blog (see instructions, below) and inviting your friends to participate — the more the better. The data from this test will be public and open; others may use it to visualize and study the connectedness of blogspace and the propagation of memes across blogs.

The GUID for this experiment is: as098398298250swg9e98929872525389t9987898tq98wteqtgaq62010920352598gawst
(this GUID enables anyone to easily search Google or other search engines for all blogs that participate in this experiment, once they have indexed the sites that participate). Anyone is free to analyze the data of this experiment. Please publicize your analysis of the data, and/or any comments by adding comments onto the original post (see URL above). (Note: it would be interesting to see a geographic map or a temporal animation, as well as a social network map of the propagation of this meme.)

INSTRUCTIONS

To add your blog to this experiment, copy this entire posting to your blog, and then answer the questions below, substituting your own information, below, where appropriate. Other than answering the questions below, please do not alter the information, layout or format of this post in order to preserve the integrity of the data in this experiment (this will make it easier for searchers and automated bots to find and analyze the results later).

REQUIRED FIELDS (Note: Replace the answers below with your own answers)

(1) I found this experiment at URL: http://www.blogdex.net

(2) I found it via “Newsreader Software” or “Browsing the Web” or “Searching the Web” or “An E-Mail Message”: Browsing the Web

(3) I posted this experiment at URL: http://natek.typepad.com

(4) I posted this on date (day/month/year): 03/08/2004

(5) I posted this at time (24 hour time): 14:43:00

(6) My posting location is (city, state, country): San Francisco, California, USA

OPTIONAL SURVEY FIELDS (Replace the answers below with your own answers):

(7) My blog is hosted by: Typepad

(8) My age is: 28

(9) My gender is: Male

(10) My occupation is: Web Designer, Web Developer

(11) I use the following RSS/Atom reader software: FeedDemon, Bloglines

(12) I use the following software to post to my blog: Typepad, Zempt

(13) I have been blogging since (day, month, year): 01/10/03

(14) My web browser is: Firefox

(15) My operating system is: Windows XP

Let America Be America Again
Langston Hughes

Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.

• http://www.curbed.com/ – good neighborhood info, with a real estate focus
• http://www.mrbellersneighborhood.com/ – seems to be blog entries mapped geographically over a NYC map.
• http://www.thirteen.org/tenement/ – lower east side tenement museum.
• http://www.skyscraper.org/timeformations/intro.html – totally cool layered view of NYC, crossed by time.
• http://www.nycsubway.org/ – unofficial subway site with history and flavor.

These huge Internet players agree that customer experience will be the key differentiator on which they stake their businesses once they’re all pointing their searches to like data.

now, 10 years into this whole Web thing, consumer expectations run so low…

The search engines are promoting bad results in absence of good ones.

While competitors are targeting the individual applications Google has deployed, Google is building a massive, general purpose computing platform for web-scale programming….which makes it cheaper and easier for them to develop and run web-scale applications than anyone else…What will they do next with the world’s biggest computer and most advanced operating system?

Abstract:

To be faced with a document collection and not to be able to find the information you know exists somewhere within it is a problem as old as the existence of document collections. Information Architecture is the discipline dealing with the modern version of this problem: how to organize web sites so that users actually can find what they are looking for.

Information architects have so far applied known and well-tried tools from library science to solve this problem, and now topic maps are sailing up as another potential tool for information architects. This raises the question of how topic maps compare with the traditional solutions, and that is the question this paper attempts to address.

The paper argues that topic maps go beyond the traditional solutions in the sense that it provides a framework within which they can be represented as they are, but also extended in ways which significantly improve information retrieval.

After giving a very clear and understandable overview of Controlled vocabularies, Taxonomies, Thesauri, Faceted classification, Ontologies and Other subject-based techniques (throughout section 3.x), the paper give a thorough but clear discussion of Topic Maps, and concludes with a well-reasoned Comparison to other techniques and approaches.

While some argue that Information Architecture is a dry subject, it’s very interesting to me to peek into the level and structure of the thinking that goes into it. The rigor can mirror and enable the technical layer.

[from InfoDesign via Digital-Web