For whatever reason, a new project called Diaspora is getting a lot of attention at the moment. They are four young guys who have managed to crowd source $100k+ to build an open, privacy respecting, peer-to-peer social network.

A number of people have asked me what I think, so instead of repeating myself over and over I thought I would write it down in one place.

First, I don’t think Diaspora is going to be the ‘thing’ that solves the problem. There are too many moving parts and too many factors (mainly political) to have any single group solve the problem by themselves.

Second, I don’t think that’s any reason to disparage or discourage them.

When we launched the DataPortability project, we didn’t claim we would solve the issue, but rather create a blueprint for how others might implement interoperable parts of the whole. We soon learned that task was impractical to say the least. The pieces were not mature enough and the politics was far too dense.

Instead, we have settled for providing a rolling commentary and context on the situation and promoting the efforts of those that are making strides in the right direction. We also play the important role of highlighting problems with closed or even anticompetitive behaviors of the larger players.

The problem with the DataPortability project, though, was not its ambition or even it’s failure to meet those ambitions, but rather the way the ‘old guard’ of the standards community reacted to it.

The fact of the matter is that the people who used to be independent open advocates were actually quite closed and cliquey. They didn’t want ‘new kids on the block’ telling them how to tell their story or promote their efforts. Instead of embracing a new catalyzing force in their midst, they set about ignoring, undermining and even actively derailing it at every opportunity.

Despite my skepticism about Diaspora, though, I don’t want to fall into the same trap. I admire and encourage the enthusiasm of this group to chase their dream of a peer-to-peer social network.

Do I think they will succeed with this current incarnation? No. Do I think they should stop trying? No.

While this project might not work their effort and energy will not go to waste.

I think we need more fresh, independent voices generating hype and attention for the idea that an open alternative to Facebook can and must exist. Their success in capturing people’s imagination only shows that there is an appetite for such a thing.

What they might do, however, is strongly consider how their work might stitch together existing open standards efforts rather than inventing any new formats or protocols. The technologies are getting very close to baked and are finding their way into the web at every turn.

We all need to do our part to embed them into every project we’re working on so that peer-to-peer, interoperable social networking will become a reality.

Welcome to the party Diaspora team, don’t let the old guard (who have largely left for BigCo’s anyway) scare you off.

Last week Elias Bizannes and I wrote a post Assessing the Openness of Facebook’s ‘Open Graph Protocol’.

To summarize that post, it’s clear that Facebook is making a play to create, aggregate and own not only identity on the web, but everything that hangs off it. From Interests to Engagement – not just on their .com but across all sites. To do this they are giving publishers token value (analytics and traffic) to take over parts of the page with pieces of Facebook.com without giving them complete access to the user , their data or the user experience (all at the exclusion of any other player). In addition, they are building a semantic map of the Internet that will broker interests and data on a scale never before seen anywhere.

In the face of such huge momentum and stunningly effective execution (kudos to them!), aiming for (or using the word) Open is no longer enough. The web community needs to up it’s game.

The same is true for data portability – the group and the idea. Data portability is no longer enough. We must raise the bar and start to aim for Interoperable Data Portability.

Interoperability means that things work together without an engineer first having to figure out what’s on the other end of an API call.

When you request ‘http://blog.areyoupayingattention.com’ it isn’t enough that the data is there, or that that its ‘open’ or ‘accessible’. No. The reason the web works is because the browser knows exactly how to request the data (HTTP) and how the data will be returned (HTML/CSS/JS). This is an interoperable transaction.

Anyone could write a web server, create a web page, or develop a web browser and it just works. Point the browser somewhere else, and it continues to work.

Now map this to the social web. Anyone could (should be able to) build an open graph, create some graph data, and point a social widget to it and it just works. Point the social widget somewhere else, and it continues to work.

As you can see from the mapping above, the interaction between a social widget and it’s social graph should be the same as that of a browser and a web-server. Not just open, but interoperable, interchangeable and standardized.

Why? Innovation.

The same kind of innovation we get when we have cutting edge web servers competing to be the best damned web server they can be (IIS vs. Apache), and cutting edge websites (Yahoo vs. MSN vs. Google vs. Every other site on the Internet) and cutting edge browsers (Netscape vs. IE vs. Safari vs. Chrome). These products were able to compete for their part in the stack.

Imagine if we got stuck with IIS,  Netscape and Altavista locking down the web with their own proprietary communication channels. The web would have been no better than every closed communication platform before it. Slow, stale and obsolete.

How do we become interoperable? It’s hard. Really hard. Those of us who manage products at scale know its easy to make closed decisions. You don’t have to be an evil mastermind – you just have to be lazy. Fight against being lazy. Think before you design, develop or promote your products – try harder. I don’t say this just to you, I say it to myself as well. I am just as guilty of this as anyone else out there developing product. We must all try harder.

Open standards are a start, but open protocols are better. Transactions that, from start to finish, provide for Discoverability, Connectivity and Exchange of data using well known patterns.

The standards groups have done a lot of work, but standards alone don’t solve the problem. It requires product teams to implement the standards and this is an area I am far more interested in these days. How do we implement these patterns at scale.

Customers (i.e. Publishers) must also demand interoperable products. Products that not just connect them to Facebook or Twitter but rather make them first class nodes on the social web.

Like we said on the DataPortability blog:

In order for true interoperable, peer-to-peer data portability to win, serious publishers and other sites must be vigilant to choose cross-platform alternatives that leverage multiple networks rather than just relying on Facebook exclusively.

In this way they become first-class nodes on the social web rather than spokes on Facebook’s hub.

But this is just the start. This just stems the tide by handing the keys to more than one player so that no one player kills us while the full transition to a true peer-to-peer model takes place.

If the web is to truly stay open and interoperable, we need to think bigger and better than just which big company (s) we want to hand our identities to.

Just like every site on the web today can have its own web server, every site should also have the choice to host (or pick) its own social server. Every site should become a fully featured peer on the social web. There is no reason why CNN can not be just as functional, powerful, effective and interchangeable as Facebook.com.

If we don’t, we will be stuck with the IIS, IE and Netscape’s of the social web and innovation will die.

MG Siegler over on Techcrunch yesterday wrote a story about how the AP is tweeting links to its stories. Those links, however, are not to its website. Instead those twitter links lead to Facebook copies of their stories!

Here’s a snippet of his post:

The AP is using their Twitter feed to tweet out their stories — nothing new there, obviously — but every single one of them links to the story on their Facebook Notes page. It’s not clear how long they’ve been doing this, but Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan noted the oddness of this, and how annoying it is, tonight. The AP obviously has a ton of media partners, and they could easily link to any of those, or even the story hosted on their own site. But no, instead they’re copying all these stories to their Facebook page and linking there for no apparent reason.

As Sullivan notes in a follow-up tweet, “i really miss when people had web sites they owned and pointed at. why lease your soul to facebook. or buzz. or whatever. master your domain.”

What’s really odd about this is the AP’s recent scuffle with Google over the hosting of AP content. The two sides appeared to reach some sort of deal earlier this month (after months of threats and actual pulled content), but now the AP is just hosting all this content on Facebook for the hell of it?

To me this isn’t unusual at all. In fact it’s common practice amongst ’social media experts’. Many of us use/used tools like FriendFeed, Buzz, Facebook etc not just to share links, but to actually host original content. We actively send all our traffic to these sites rather than using them as draws back to our own open blog/publishing platforms.

I completely agree with MG. Sending your audience to a closed destination site which provides you no brand control, monetization or cross-sell capability shows a profound misunderstanding of the economics of publishing.

Some will argue that the content should find the audience, and they should be free to read it wherever they like. Sure, I won’t disagree with that, but actively generating it in a non-monetizable place and actively sending people there seems like a missed opportunity to me. Why not generate it on your blog and then simply share the links in other places. If those users choose to chat over there, that’s fine, but the first, best place to view the content and observe the conversation should always be at the source, at YOUR source. YOUR site.

Some will argue that those platforms generate more engagement than a regular blog/site. They generate engagement because your blog is not looked after. You’re using inferior plugins and have not taken the time to consider how your blog can become a first class social platform. You’re willing to use tools that cannibalize your audience rather than attract them. You’re willing to use your  blog as a traffic funnel back to other destination sites by replacing big chunks of it with FriendFeed streams rather than hosting your own LifeStream like Louis Gray and Leo Laporte have done.

Some will argue (or not, because they don’t realize or don’t want to say it out loud) that they are not journalists, they are personalities, and they go wherever their audience is. They don’t monetize their content, they monetize the fact that they HAVE an audience by getting paying jobs that enable them to evangelize through any channel that they choose. Those people (and there are very few of them) have less incentive to consolidate their content sources (although there are still reasons to do so). Unfortunately, though, media properties sometimes get confused and think they can do the same thing.

The list of reasons why publishing stuff on Buzz or FriendFeed or Facebook as a source rather than an aggregator goes on and on, so I will just stop here.

I’m glad MG has picked up on it and written about it on Techcrunch.

#blogsareback

Update: Steve Rubel is agreeing with the AP’s approach. Using all sorts of fancy words like Attention Spirals, Curating and Relationships Steve is justifying APs ritual suicide of their destination site in favor of adding value, engagement and traffic to Facebook. Sorry Steve, but giving Facebook all your content and your traffic and not getting anything in return is called giving away the house.

Again, I’m not advocating that you lock content away behind paywalls, I’m simply saying that you need to own the source and make your site a first-class citizen on the social web. Not make Facebook the only game in town by handing it your audience.

Over on EdgeTheory Conversations Louis Gray and I discuss Buzz and Google’s missed opportunity to be a pure aggregator.

Head on over to the site and check it out.

FriendFeed was dead, now it is re-born as Google Buzz.

I’ve not been able to try the product yet, but philosophically and architecturally it seems superior to FriendFeed.

Here are my observations so far:

Consumption Tools

Buzz is better than FriendFeed because Google is treating it as a consumption tool rather than a destination site (by placing it in Gmail rather than hosting it on a public page). FriendFeed should have always been treated this way. Some people got confused and started hosting public discussions on FriendFeed.

That being said, though, I’ve long said that news and sharing is not the same as an email inbox and those sorts of items should not be ‘marked as read’ but rather stream by in an ambient way.

While Buzz is in fact a stream, it is its own tab that you have to focus on rather than a sidebar you can ignore (at least as far as I can tell right now).

How it affects Publishers (and Echo)

The inevitable question of ‘How does this affect Echo‘ has already come up on Twitter. Like FriendFeed before it, Buzz generates siloed conversations that do not get hosted at the source.

So, the publisher spends the time and money to create the content and Buzz/Google get the engagement/monetization inside Gmail.

For some reason, all these aggregators think that they need to create content to be of value. I disagree. I long for a pure aggregator that does not generate any of its own content such as comments, likes, shares etc.

That being said, however, the more places we have to engage with content the more reasons there are for Echo to exist so that publishers can re-assemble all that conversation and engagement back on their sites.

Synaptic Connections

Note that they don’t have a ‘Follow’ button – it’s using synaptic connections to determine who you care about. Very cool! I worry though that there might not be enough controls for the user to override the assumptions.

Open Standards

Already, Marshall is calling it the savior of open standards. I don’t think Open Standards need to be saved – but they certainly have all the buzz words on their site so that’s promising.

That’s it for now, maybe more later when I’ve had a chance to play with it.

Update: After playing with it this morning, and reading a little more, it’s clear that this is actually Jaiku reborn (not FriendFeed), because the Jaiku team were involved in building it. They deserve a lot of credit for inventing much of this stuff in the first place – long before FriendFeed.

Also, having used it only for an hour, the unread count on the Buzz tab is driving me nuts. It shouldn’t be there. It’s a stream not an inbox. Also it makes no sense why I can’t display buzz in a sidebar on the right side of my primary Gmail inbox view. That would be ideal.

It’s also funny to me that some people have tried to give Chris Messina credit for Buzz even though he’s been at Google for no more than a month. They clearly don’t understand how long and hard it is to build product. Messina is good, but he aint that good

Marshall Kirkpatrick has written a thoughtful piece over on Read/Write Web entitled ‘Facebook and the future of Free Thought‘ in which he explains the hard facts about news consumption and the open subscription models that were supposed to create a more open playing field for niche voices.

In it, he states that news consumption has barely changed in the last 10 years. RSS and Feed Readers drive very little traffic and most people still get their news from hand selected mainstream portals and destination sites (like MSN News and Yahoo news etc). In other words, mainstream users do not curate and consume niche subscriptions and are quite content to read what the mainstream sites feed them.

This is troubling news (pun intended) for those of us who believe that the democratization of publishing might open up the world to niche voices and personalized story-telling.

Marshall goes on to argue that Facebook might be our last hope. That since everyone spends all their time in Facebook already, that the service has an opportunity to popularize the notion of subscribing to news sources and thereby bring to life our collective vision of personalized news for the mainstream. Facebook already does a great deal of this with users getting large amounts of news and links from their friends as they share and comment on links.

Through my work with APML I have long dreamed of a world where users are able to view information through a highly personalized lens – a lens that allows them to see personally relevant news instead of just popular news (note that Popularity is a factor of personal relevancy, but it is not the only factor). That doesn’t mean the news would be skewed to one persuasion (liberal or conservative for example) but rather to a specific topic or theme.

Could Facebook popularize personalized news? Should it? Do we really want a closed platform to dictate how the transports, formats and tools of next generation story-telling get built? If so, would we simply be moving the top-down command and control systems of network television and big media to another closed platform with its own limitations and restrictions?

Personalized news on closed platforms are almost as bad as mainstream news on closed platforms. News organizations and small niche publishers both need a way to reach their audience using open technologies or we are doomed to repeat the homogenized news environment of the last 2 decades. The one that failed to protect us from a war in Iraq, failed to innovate when it came to on-demand, and failed to allow each of us to customize and personalize our own news reading tools.

That’s why technologies like RSS/Atom, PubSubHub and others are so important.

What’s missing now is a presentation tool that makes these technologies sing for the mainstream.

So far, as an industry, we’ve failed to deliver on this promise. I don’t have the answers for how we might succeed. But succeed we must.

Perhaps established tier 1 media sites have a role to play. Perhaps market forces that are driving them to cut costs and innovate will drive these properties to turn from purely creating mainstream news editorially toward a model where they curate and surface contributions from their readership and the wider web.

In other words, Tier 1 publishers are being transformed from content creators to content curators – and this could change the game.

In the race to open up and leverage social and real-time technologies, these media organizations are actually making way for the most effective democratization of niche news yet.

Niche, personalized news distributed by open news hubs born from the ‘ashes’ of old media.

Don’t like the tools one hub gives you? Switch to another. the brands we all know and love have an opportunity to become powerful players in the news aggregation and consumption game. Will they respond in time?

Due to my experience working with Tier 1 publishers for Echo, I have high hopes for many of them to learn and adapt. But much more work still remains.

Learn more about how news organizations are practically turning into personalized news curation hubs over on the Echo Blog.

Be even more true to myself and others

There are too many times when there are people in our ecosystem, and in our world, who bully or bluster their way through things. This is corrosive to us all and blocks innovation and real discourse. I plan to be true to myself and others when dealing with these kinds of people.

We need to remember that those who have a voice are not necessarily right. And those who are right are not necessarily being heard.

Forget the numbers – Make a connection

All too often our community turns into a game of numbers and influence instead of real friendships. Sure having an audience is important for some of the things we do, but I’d rather have a group of 5 real friends, than 5000 ‘friends’ on facebook.

This will include less parties and more private dinners or gatherings with people I love and respect.

Remember to pay attention

All too often we are too busy looking up to others, trying to get on the next big level, and we forget that there are really valuable people and projects right here next to us. I want to meet more people who have less voice, but have equal (or better) ideas, projects or companies.

I want to help those people succeed.

Maintain optimism

I don’t want to become jaded or complacent about where I live and the opportunities I have. I’ve lived in Silicon Valley going on a year now (+ all the time I spent there before that) – it could be easy to forget just how lucky I am.

I will continue to try my best to avoid that this year.

I give Facebook a lot of crap. But I don’t think their latest privacy changes are all that nefarious.

It’s pretty obvious what they are doing. They want search inventory to sell to Google and Microsoft. They want to be as cool as Twitter.

I think the more important story is that they are turning their square into a triangle.

A well placed friend of mine (who shall remain nameless) gave me this metaphor (I will try not to butcher it too much).

Twitter is like a triangle. Small group of people (on top) broadcasting to a large group of people down bottom.

Facebook is/was more like a square. Everyone communicating more or less as equal peers (at least on their own personal profile pages).

This is very rare on the internet. It’s rare anywhere really. It’s unusual to have a platform that encourages so much ‘public’ peer-2-peer participation.

It’s clear, however, that Facebook is trying to have its cake and eat it too. They want to be a triangle for those who want one, and a square for those who want one of those.

Will it work? Maybe. They are a ‘Social Utility’ after all. They have never thought of themselves as a vertical social network with a static social contract. As I’ve said before, their ability to change and evolve at scale is beyond impressive. It has never been seen before.

From College kid profile pages, to app platform, to stream platform, to stream platform with deep identity and routing. Their flexibility, rate of change and reinvention is staggering. They put Madonna and Michael Jackson to shame.

Ultimately Facebook wants to be the Microsoft Outlook and Google Adsense of the Social Web all rolled into one. Maybe throw some PayPal in for good measure.

To do this I think you will see them continue to provide square or triangle options for their users (with their own personal bias towards triangles) and deprecate legacy parts of their system like canvas pages and groups.

Ultimately, though, the real opportunity is to look beyond the public vs. private debate and observe the ‘Multiple Publics’ that Danah Boyd and Kevin Marks speak about. But that’s a post for another day.

Is this good or bad for us? I’m not sure it matters. It’s another big bet for the company though, and it was a necessary step to clean up the half steps that resulted in privacy setting hell on the service so far.

As you might know if you follow my work even remotely, my projects almost always come from a place of philosophical supposition. That is, I first create a model that I think matches the current and emerging state of the world, and then I create a product, project, format or other that works inside, encourages or commercializes that model.

Many of my colleagues at JS-Kit do the same thing. Khris Loux and I, for example, spend hours and hours discussing our shared world views and how this translates to features, business direction and general life goals.

This methodology allows us to couch our decisions in well thought out mental models to make them more consistent, predictable and, we hope, more effective.

Over the years, and with my friends, I’ve proposed a number of these philosophical models including APML, DataPortability and most recently (this time working with Khris) SynapticWeb.

One of the hardest aspects of creating a philosophical model, however, is truly letting it guide you. To trust it. To take it’s premise to the logical conclusion. Another challenge is explaining this methodology (and the value of the resulting outcomes) to others who a) don’t think this way and b) have not taken the time to examine and live the model more fully.

Many times, the choices and decisions that I/we make from these models are nuanced, but the sum of their parts, we believe, are significant.

Let me make some concrete examples.

Social Media

There is this ongoing tension between the value of social/user generated media and the media produced by ‘Journalists’. Sure social media is amazing, some say, but bloggers will never replace the role of Journalists.

The fact of the matter is, if your philosophical world view is that Social Media is important, that it is a return to one-to-one personal story telling and that it allows those in the know – involved in the action – to report their first hand accounts, then you must necessarily expand your imagination and have the conviction to follow that line of logic all the way to the end.

If you do, you must necessarily discover that the distinction between Journalists and ‘Us’ as social media participants (all of us) is authority, perspective, distribution and an attempt at impartiality.

In the end, however, we are each human beings (yes, even the journalists). Journalists are imbued with authority because a trusted news brand vets and pays them, they are given the gift of perspective because they sit above the news and are not part of it, they have distribution because their media outlet prints millions of pieces of paper or reaches into the cable set top boxes of millions of homes and their impartiality is a lie.

Can’t these traits be replicated in social media? Of course they can.

Reputation can be algorithmically determined or revealed through light research/aggregation, perspective can be factored in by intelligent human beings or machines that find both sides of a story, distribution is clearly a solved problem through platforms like Twitter, Digg and others and impartiality is still a lie. At least in social media bias is revealed and transparency is the new impartiality.

I don’t mean to provide an exhaustive reasoning on why Social Media as a philosophical framework holds up as new paradigm for news gathering and reporting here – only to give an example of how we must allow ourselves to imagine outside the box and have the conviction to fully believe in our own assumptions.

Streams

The same type of artificial mental barriers have appeared at every step of the way with each of the philosophical frameworks in which I have participated. Streams, is the most recent.

When we launched Echo we proposed that any conversation anywhere, irrespective of the mode or channel in which it was taking place, had the potential to be a first class part of the canonical and re-assembled lifestream of a piece of content.

Many pushed back. “Oh a Tweet can’t possibly be as valuable as a comment” they lamented. They’re wrong.

A Tweet, an @ Reply, a Digg, a Digg Comment, a Facebook Status Update, a Facebook Comment, an ‘on page’ comment and any other form of reaction each have just as much potential for value as the other.

Some have created artificial distinctions between them. They separate the stream into ‘Comments’ and ‘Social Reactions’. I have news for everyone. A comment is a social reaction. Thinking of it as anything less is a failure of imagination and conviction. The trick is not a brute force separation of the two, but rather a nuanced set of rules that help diminish the noise and highlight the signal – where ever it might be – from any mode or channel. We’ve started that process in Echo with a feature we call ‘Whirlpools’.

Communities

Another interesting failure of imagination that I come up against a lot lately is the notion of community building.

With Echo, we have taken the philosophical position that users already have a social network – many have too many of them in fact. There is no reason for them to join yet another network just to comment. Not ours, not our publisher’s.

No, instead they should be able to bring their social network with them, participate with the content on a publisher’s website, share with their existing friends on existing social networks, and leave just as easily.

By using Echo, you are not joining ‘our community’. You already have a community. If anything you are participating in the Publishers community – not ours.

We don’t welcome new customers to ‘Our community’. Instead we help their users bring their community to a piece of content, interact, share and leave.

Publishers invest large quantities of capital in producing high quality content only to have the engagement and monetization opportunities occur on Social Networks. In these tough economic times, publishers can not afford to bleed their audience and SEO to yet another social network just to facilitate commenting. That is the opposite of the effect they are trying to achieve by adding rich commenting in the first place.

If we use our imagination, and have the conviction to see our ideas through, we realize that publishers need tools that encourage on-site engagement and re-assemble offsite reactions as well – not bolster the branded 3rd party communities of the products they use.

Be Brave

In summation – be brave. Observe the world, define a philosophical framework, imagine the possibilities and have the conviction to follow through on your ideas. Stop being lazy. Stop stopping short of taking your impulses to their logical conclusions because I’ve found, when you consistently execute on your vision it might be a little harder to sell your point of differentiation – but your contributions will ultimately be better, more consistent and more long lasting for your company, the web and the rest of the world.

Many, many of the things in our lives could be called ‘Memes’.  Here’s what happens when you type ‘Define:meme’ into Google.

a cultural unit (an idea or value or pattern of behavior) that is passed from one person to another by non-genetic means (as by imitation); “memes …
wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn

The Morlocks are a group of several fictional comic book mutants associated with the X-Men in the Marvel Comics universe. Created by writer Chris Claremont and artist Paul Smith, they were named after the subterranean race of the same name in H. G. Wells’ novel The Time Machine. …
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme_(comics)

The term Internet meme (, ) is a phrase used to describe a catchphrase or concept that spreads quickly from person to person via the Internet …
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme_(Internet)

“Meme|ミーム miimu” is Rurutia’s 4th and last original album under Toshiba-EMI and was released April 13, 2005.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme_(Rurutia_album)

A meme ( – rhyming with “cream”), is a postulated unit or element of cultural ideas, symbols or practices that gets transmitted from one mind to …
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme

Any unit of cultural information, such as a practice or idea, that is transmitted verbally or by repeated action from one mind to another. …
en.wiktionary.org/wiki/meme

As defined by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene (1976): “a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. …
www.silcom.com/~barnowl/chain-letter/glossary.htm

An idea or pattern of thought that “replicates” like a virus by being passed along from one thinker to another. …
web.cn.edu/kwheeler/lit_terms_M.html

Richard Dawkins’s 1976 coinage, on the analogy to gene (with a little aid from mime and mimic), for a cultural copying unit, such as the word or melody that is mimicked by others.
williamcalvin.com/LEM/LEMend.htm

viral encapsulated idea, with built-in feedback loop.
www.awaredesign.co.nz/glossary.html

An idea that, like a gene, can replicate and evolve. Examples of memes (and meme systems) include political theories, proselytizing religions, and …
wfmh.org.pl/enginesofcreation/EOC_Glossary.html

Leftist pseudo-intellectualese or linguistic affectation, generally used in the pejorative, employed to designate a commonly held position …
www.theacru.org/blog/2007/04/a_dictionary_to_educate_the_politically_incorrect/

a cultural item or idea that is transmitted by repetition in a manner analogous to the propagation of biological genes. 10
thesis.jessierauch.com/index.php/about/glossary/

an idea, concept, belief, thought, project etc. that is transmitted verbally or by repeated action. Memes propagate themselves and can move through a ‘culture’ in a manner similar to a virus.
blackbookactivists.com/others/glossary.doc

Memes are everywhere. We just experienced a country wide meme here in the US called ‘Thanksgiving’. We are about to hit a similar meme (except this one is global) called ‘Christmas’.

Memes are fascinating things. They are almost as important as Context, Perspective and Metaphors. Together these three things compose the great majority of our thought processes.

What is this like (metaphor), What else is going on (context), What does everyone else think (meme), What does my experience and current state of mind tell me (Perspective).

Some memes emerge organically over time – like folding the end of hotel toilet paper into a little triangle. Others are created through brute force by strategic construction and repetition. No one has mastered this better than the extreme right wing of the US political system. Fox news is a bright shining example of how to craft, seed, propagate and manipulate a meme.

Silicon Valley loves a meme. We live on them. In fact one could argue that the whole ecosystem would shut down without the meme of the day, week and bubble.

.Com, Web 2.0, Data Portability, Real-time web, RSS is dead, Myspace, Facebook, Twitter, Cloud, Semantic Web, Synaptic Web and so on and so forth.

Like in real life, some of these memes emerge organically, some through brute force. Some make more sense than others. Some of these memes get undue attention. Some are created to stir controversy. Others form organically to create a shorthand. Some are genuine cultural shifts that have been observed and documented.

These memes matter. They matter a lot. They dictate a large part of how people act, what they pay attention to and their assumptions about the world in which they live, and the people they encounter. In Silicon Valley they dictate who gets heard and which projects get funded. They form the basis of many of our decisions.

Some services like Techmeme do a very good job at capturing daily memes. I’ve yet to see a service that captures memes that span weeks, months, years or even decades though. I dream of such a service. Particularly one focused on news memes.

Imagine being able to zoom in and out of the news, and drag the timeline back and forth like some kind of Google maps for headlines. Imagine being able to read about an IED explosion in Bagdad and quickly understand its context in the decade long struggle for the entire region through some kind of clustered headline/topic view.

Consider the context, perspective and metaphoric power such a tool would give us. How could it change our world view and help turn the temporary, vacuous nature of a microblog update into something far more substantial and impactful with an in line summary of the rich historic narrative inside which it belongs.

The algorithm to create such correlations and the user interface to present it would challenge even the smartest mathematicians and user interaction designers I imagine. It’s commercial value is vague at best. It probably shouldn’t be attached to a business at all – maybe it should be some kind of wikipedia style gift to the world.

Maybe the news media, Reuters, CNN and Washington Post might take it upon themselves to sponsor such a project in an effort to re-contextualize their news archives in the new AAADD, real-time, now, now now, every one is a journalist media world.

I’ve bought some domains and done some mockups of such a service, but I probably would never have the time or the patience to build it – at least not in the foreseeable future.

Maybe I’m just dreaming. But I think it’s a good dream!