| With apologies to Eric Clapton and Leon Russell : I knew all the time but now I'm gonna let you know: I'm gonna keep on rocking, no matter if it's fast or slow. Ain't gonna stop until the twenty-fifth hour, 'Cause now I'm living on meme power. There's a curious thing happening in BlogSpace this week. We've got Blogdex tracking links between blogs; Google tracking related websites. Then there's the whole Radio Userland blog community generating lots of metadata around weblogs.com and the Radio Community Server. Some of this is open to all, while some of it is extracted from Radio users only. In particular they track all the RSS news headline channels that are read by Radio users. The next piece is the habit Bloggers have of building a "blogroll" of blogs they frequently read and posting it on the site as a set of links, often with links to the related RSS. And then there's people trawling their referer files and turning it into pages of backlinks. Then something happened on May 30. Matt Griffith posted a suggestion about putting a link to the RSS for a page into the html of the page. Mark Pilgrim picked up on it and started evangelizing it. Within hours, people throughout the Blog community started implementing it. This leapt up the Blogdex and Daypop charts and spread like wildfire as people built support into all the major Blog CMS. Within a day people had started creating bookmarklets and other tools to take advantage of the new data. Then one more latent meme got tossed into the mix to do with trying to find ways of navigating through the vast number of blogs. If we start mining all this data, maybe we can start at a weblog and explore it's neighbourhood in blogspace; all the blogs and sites that are "close" to this one. And so some new services were born. eg All this is certainly fun and it may or may not be important, but what I find fascinating is how fast it spread. From initial spark, to widespread adoption, to secondary code to exploit it, took 6 days. We used to joke about "Internet time" but this is getting ridiculous. But that's what you get when you're "Living on Meme Power" |
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[ 04-Jun-02 9:32pm ]
