I don’t know why it happened, I don’t know how I found it, but the hyperlinks to some of my noise files were broken, and are now fixed. Enjoy. If you can.

Not often, but every now and again I get a little guilty about my Google ranking for a particular query. At the moment I’m getting a lot of folks looking up The Clarence Hotel in Petersham, which is our new Sydney Scared Scriptless Theatresports venue. Unfortunately though, I don’t blog that much about it, even though I’m sort of directing or producing the show or something like that.

I mean we have a Scared Scriptless web site, which is unfortunately not really functional at the moment, but it will be up real soon now. Ryan?

But for news about the shows, people are still somehow finding their way to my blog, and certainly the first paragraph of this post isn’t going to change that too much. At least the title isn’t going to top things off.

The thing about Google, is that it is supposed to level the playing field, find the things you need, with the rankings you want, filter out those who are trying to stack things in their favor, and everyone’s happy. The problem of course is that most people don’t actually understand the mechanics and structure required of a good site to support Google and it’s peers, meaning that to keep a level playing field, I should really dumb down my site’s data quality.

But then who am I to complain if I get a higher ranking? If my Google referers are anything to go by, I should keep writing for my audience of people interested in Kristy Kreme (check the spelling), Oriental Lillies, How to win lotto and of course Scared Scriptless in Sydney.

The answer of course is for web site authors to do it right the first time, a good starting point being Gina Trapani’s Scribbling.net post on helping Googlebot to understand your site.

This might seem a little hypocritical, but what’s with the word meme anyway?!

Sure, it’s not like I don’t know what it is or where it came from, but the fact that you’re probably sitting there in a smug little voice going “He doesn’t know what it is or where it came from” is enough to make you think there’s something about the word meme, don’t you think? You can think about it, but don’t blog about it, propagation isn’t in my game plan here. I mean if I say what’s with the word “obstetrician”, you don’t sit there thinking “He doesn’t know what obstetrician means”, do you? Not that the dictionary is particularly helpful either.

Then there’s the hesitancy of people to use the word. You watch, whenever someone says “meme”, heads look up. “Did someone say meme?” And the expression on the person’s face, it’s obvious they’re embarrassed to say it. In fact I don’t think I’ve ever said the word meme, or even obstetrician for that matter.

In fact I’d thought up this amusing rant about how meme’s are so up themselves, but of course that’s already been done to death.

The concept of memes is itself a meme. Even the idea that the concepts of memes is itself a meme has become a widely spread meme. However, the idea that the idea that the concepts of memes is itself a meme, is not yet a meme.

I could always get on the I hate memes bandwagon, but again meme propagation somewhat defeats my purpose.

Instead, I learnt a new word today: absoloodle. Apparently you can’t use it on its own, you have to use it in conjunction with chicken noodle. i.e. absoloodle chicken noodle. First I thought it some strange Cairns term, but no, my nut bar sister made it up, and it supposedly means what you think it means: yes, that’s right!

The beauty of it is that absoloodle chicken noodle doesn’t even pop up in Google yet, which is scaring me, because that implies its a meme. Perhaps the dictionary should have that next to the definition “meme, n. Not yet in Google.”

So there you go, a veritable smorgasboard of memes. Do I hate memes? Absoloodle chicken noodle!

As much as I appreciate the traffic, I wonder if j1332.inktomisearch.com could stop crawling my home page every hour, and actually crawl my whole site every week. Is that too much to ask? Geez, Google gets it, can’t you copy them, they’re supposed to be the benchmark?

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://mentalized.net

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

(3) I posted this experiment at URL: http://www.kashum.com/blog

(4) I posted this on date (day/month/year): 04/08/04

(5) I posted this at time (24 hour time): 01:50:00

(6) My posting location is (city, state, country): Sydney, NSW, Australia

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

(7) My blog is hosted by: My own custom software

(8) My age is: 37

(9) My gender is: Male

(10) My occupation is: Software Architect, COO

(11) I use the following RSS/Atom reader software: Sauce Reader

(12) I use the following software to post to my blog: My own custom software

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

(14) My web browser is: Safari

(15) My operating system is: Mac OS X

I’ve just added another synthetic feed, new releases from Chaos Music.

Ooops… My RSS feed was breaking several readers, because it included 150 blog posts, and that’s just a little too big for some to handle. I’ve now set it at 30, but stay tuned for a better way to solve the problem of how to get older posts if you’ve only just joined the feed. RSS, talk about poorly designed.

And just to piss people off, my RSS 2.0 feed has changed its URL one more time. I’m amazed at the dumb decisions you can make in the early hours of the morning, and with all my ranting and raving about how the XML logo is just plain stupid as an RSS feed icon, what do I do? I go and call my feed blog.xml. So, to future proof it, I’ve changed it to: ?c=customiseFeed”>customised feed changing appropriately.

Last week I said I’d put a manifesto up here, to guide my blogging. Aside from it being the current fad, I decided I needed a little more focus to my writing. While my web site dates back to about 1993 or so, I only started blogging, albeit exceptionally intermittently, back in October 2001. A recent day job foray into blogging technology however, has spurred me to start writing more often.

So ultimately, this blog exists mainly to help me research the blogosphere, to get inside the heads of bloggers by being one myself, and to use this knowledge to help build better tools and technologies for the blogging and microcontent space. So without getting too serious, this is my blogging manifesto.

I want to experience and experiment with the three main blogging types:

1. Original writing from original research
2. Advance, extend (and credit) other writers
3. Refer readers to other research/resources that relate to my writing

In support of these, I’ve defined the following guidelines for my writing:

1. Be pedantic, be cynical, but do it with humor (U.S. spelling due to Macquarie boycott)
2. Make people think, when they ordinarily may not have
3. Have an opinion, but don’t be opinionated
4. Don’t insult, abuse, ridicule or belittle other writers, but do point out corrections and inaccuracies in their writing
5. Don’t get too serious, and save the theoretics for my work blog

Ultimately, if you as a reader can laugh at, learn from and then think about one my posts, then I guess I’ve succeeded.

I just changed a bunch of URLs around today, so apologies if your permalinks or feed got messed up in the process. It’s computing damn it, if they stayed permalinks, we’d lose our industry’s bad reputation! The new RSS URL is http://www.kashum.com/rbf.pl?c=blog.xml, and the old one will go away in about a week.