Category Archives: Uncategorized

The irony is so thick, you’d think I use rogaine: overstated is on the daypop top 40, but has yet to appear on blogdex, thanks to some bugs I introduced last night. Where I come from, they call that gettin’ poked in the patoot by yer own pitchfork. Maybe someday I’ll make it onto blogdexContinue reading “Overstated on Daypop”

look ma, I grew a baby!

A bit of context for the previous post: Let’s use Dave Winer’s scripting.com as an example. By looking at the social network of scripting.com, we see that Dave has a slew of people who read him, and also that he reads a number of other weblogs. These are Dave’s “social ties,” or the individuals thatContinue reading “Social networks by example”

The traditional assessment of the dissemination of information assumes that people fall into adopter categories. These classes of innovativeness have become popular parts of our vernacular: innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority and laggards. My analysis of the blogdex data has shown that webloggers do fall into such neat buckets. over the course ofContinue reading “Weblogs and adopter categories”

hmm.. Google is holding a contest to find the best new technology, run on a data set of about 900,000 web pages. The winner gets: $10,000 hard cash, a “VIP” visit to Google, and the potential to run your idea on the entire data set of over 3 billion pages. Google gets (fine print): “aContinue reading “New Google scam!”

I’m starting to collect the number of false stories that have been hitting mass media lately: a boy cries as teenagers hang his dog in front of him, only to reveal later that his story was a big fat lie. enron’s ken lay goes missing, then is found. the most recent retraction? the airline toiletContinue reading “News agencies cry wolf”

I’ve found a couple of interesting early citations on information diffusion. This from “Person to Person Communication of News,” by Bradley S. Greenberg, from Journalism Quarterly, 1960: “It appears unwarranted, or at least insufficient to index a news event’s importance in terms of the number of persons who are aware of the event. This grantsContinue reading “News diffusion”

holy fucking shit: Bush, Blair Nominated for 2002 Nobel Peace Prize. what absurdist world have I been injected into?

From “The illusion of diffusion in information systems research,” (requires acrobat) by Tom McMaster: “An analysis of the citations from a sample of the literature suggests that claims that diffusion research is a mature domain of study may be wildly exaggerated. This contribution provides an alternative view of diffusionism as an amalgam of pseudo-scientific justificationsContinue reading “The illusion of diffusion”

before there was googlewhacking, there was wordwatching, the game of predicting and observing buzzwords. looking at the winners from previous years, i’m not placing any bets on “pink viagra” or “in silico.”