The Center for Idea Control

Mike posted a little something about comment spamming that was more or less for my benefit. In the interest of bringing something fruitful to the conversation I went out and did a little digging on blog authority. I found a whole bunch of bullshit and a lot of math majors struggling to find a thesis project.

I also found this guy's site. He uses a lot of jargon the I consciously avoided learning whilst taking stats in college, but he mitigates it with other, more common sense language--and scatterplots. I like scatterplots. Scatterplots let me pretend I understand statistical analysis.

It's interesting reading, I think I might finally pull the trigger and add a new link to my blogroll.

He also has a project called blogdex. Its purpose is to "objectively describe the information epidemics that occur regularly within informal social networks." This interests me greatly. I kind of cut my teeth on this stuff in my devisive Senior Seminar on Metaphysics and Epistemology. I did some research into memetics to provide a counterpoint to all the goddamned neo-Aristotilian epistemological crap spewing from the seminary students.

I see a problem with his methodology though. If blogdex is meant to facilitate an academic analysis--which it very well may not be--then putting it up for public consumption would have the potential to wildly exaggerate the "epidemics" he's trying to study.

This is dependent on how popular his site is of course, and since it appears to be link dependent, blogdex couldn't directly sway results.

But it will channel more bloggers to those particularly viral ideas, exposing more people to them and potentially generating more links. And on and on.

That's the problem with treating information as an organism, it feeds off attention. The effect is compounded when releasing findings on the information you've studied to the same meme pool the information itself exists in. But when the information set is human correspondence and the transmission agent is something as potent as the internet, there really isn't a way around it. Unless he was to not publish at all. Then I couldn't have written this blog. I'm sure no one wants that.

It's like giving hamhocks to a pride of lions and documenting with astonishment as they follow your Land Rover around--interesting but skewed. God that's a really bad analogy.

Of all the things those nuts (the Neo-Aristotelian/Thomist/Perceyans) took issue with, they had the toughest time arguing against memetics as a theory of information transmission. They basically thought it had some self-reference problems. They also said the idea was "very scary"--one of the better arguments I heard. The implications of memetics are scary, and also thrilling.