Slashdot Mirror
Web Log 'Word Bursts' Could Identify New Crazes
Zorgatron writes "New Scientist reports that a researcher from Cornell University has come up with clever method of identifying what's cool by automatically searching weblogs. Sudden increases or "bursts" in the usage of particular words may reflect a new craze, according to Jon Kleinberg. He has demonstrated the technique by searching through state of the union addresses given since 1790." I wonder how long before this can be done real time enough to really make this useful.
Could this be what Google wants with Blogger?
They have the capacity to do this, I don't see why they wouldnt.
Pain lasts, kid. Its how you know you're alive. Sometimes I think this growing up thing is just pain management-TheMaxx
or else they'll think that goatse.cx is now considered cool.
Theres another "what's popular on blogs" webpage at Blogdex. It tracks links, showing which pages are most linked to.
daed si luap
In a simple historical test of the technique, Kleinberg analysed all the annual State of the Union addresses given by US Presidents since 1790. He found that particular word "bursts" could indeed be linked to important events at the time the speeches were delivered.
Has an important increase of the use of the word "nukular" been reported in the last few weeks then?
Google can do much the same thing, on a real-time basis, by examining what phrases are searched for.
..Now we're going to see Pepsi add's slinging "in soviet russia, you drink pepsi' , and Nike yelling about "all your sports belong to us..."...
I lost my concept of community when my community lost all concept of me.
I can already see the collusion of weblog editors.
"Okay, everyone write about polka dot socks tomorrow. And throw in something about drinking rotten milk. I bet we can start a new fad..."
Scott, Keeper of the Crystal Flame
By my definition "cool" is that which most people have not yet discovered. Example: that... ah, but I'm not going to tell you. Perhaps this method can tell you what just became cool, but it's hard to track something that is by definition under the radar. Otherwise, just track Google searches. You'll soon see what's popular.
Sig for sale or rent. One previous user. Inquire within.
These techniques could easily be expanded to searching weblogs - I imagine the findings could be very interesting for content providers - eg a simple measure of what people want to read about.
Vacancy for signature. Apply within.
It's all part of Google's master plan! Daily indexes of the web including blogs to find new crazes so they can buy stock in companies involved in those crazes. They'll all be rich!!! Muahahahaha.
"Joe Millionaire winner" and "Bubb Rubb" have generated most of my personal blog's hits.
I, myself, am a distant third.
Write about enough things and then check your referral logs for Google and Yahoo searches (which include the query in the URL), and you get an imperfect idea of what people are interested in this week.
Joe
http://www.joegrossberg.com
I wonder how long before this can be done real time enough to really make this useful.
Define "useful."
I wonder how long before this can be done real time enough to really make this useful.
Yes, I bet the spammers can't wait until they can use it...
There are fewer illiterates than people who can't read.
Imagine the feedback loop that could develop...
And think, the DMCA will become the most popular piece of legislation in existance - at least on slashdot.
And CowboyNeal is the most popular man alive!
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
'has come up with clever method of identifying what's cool'
So is this guy like Screech in Saved by the Bell, constantly looking for a way to impress Zack and the guys?
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
unless your IQ is so low that you're taking pleasure being the first to quote Zerowing AYBABTU in your office.
Seriously, just read /. if you want to know the important stuff of the day. :)
by the time it's talked about on the internet, us real trendsetters have moved on to something else :o)
This system should be run over all speech's too. ".Net" "Drag & Drop" "Point & Click" they are full of it.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
my big question is about the algorithm... it doesn't seem difficult to parse a document, store the words in (let's say) a tree, then compare it other documents. simple keep counters for each word to track how often it's mentioned.
i'd really like to know what this guy did.
http://www.daypop.com
Its got the top 40 every day. Doing it some other way would only catch memes sooner. And if the system doesn't catch it until its popular, it really doesn't help. What we need is a large and complete database of all meme type things.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
Whoopeee. The marketers will start using this to identify trends, and next thing you know, we'll have some fast food named "Cheese-Eating Surrender Monkeys."
Not In Our Brand Name, say I.
Of course, since there is only a very specific socioeconomic subset of the world population weblogging, what real usefulness does this give us? Honestly, even if you did ranking based on the most popular weblogs, that wouldn't help you very much.
:P. Unless this thing actually can find out the things that people are excited about that aren't well-known, it's pretty much just another search tool limited to blogs.
Furthermore, this thing isn't telling me anything I don't know. So it finds the word "Vietnam" during the Vietnam years. Hooray. I bet it finds the word Iraq today, or the phrase "Bin Ladin" last year.
Whoopdie-do. I'm impressed
New method discovered by Cornell scientist discovers that Slashdot is not cool anymore due to the same words (Linux and Open Source) being repeated over and over again.
News at 11.
Why have to wait until it's realtime? Historical analysis is very useful, and not just to historians. Linguists, anthropologists, social scientists, etc.. Taking such a body of texts is called studying a "corpus," and such studies often yield surprising and interesting results (better than "atomic" showing up in the ocld war). A new method like this would be very useful to nearly every discipline in the humanities I can think of
Not all geeks are computer geeks. Not all nerds care only about the future.
The ultimate way of watching trends on a month-to-month basis has to be Zeitgeist from Google.
Celebrate Excellence!
Did anyone read the article? Amazingly enough this wonderful software with its POWERFUL algorithms proved a true point of "no shit". While running this gem of coding genius, the authors managed to find reoccuring references to "Depression" while scanning texts from the 1930's. Imagine that, finding the word depression from a time period thats been nicknamed "The Great Depression" I would of never linked the word "Depression" with "The Great Depression". Have we really reached the point where we can just do the same shit over and over again and it's magically a new invention?
MS is bringing out 3 Degrees which is reinventing IRC, this guy is telling us the painfully obvious, and I've been working on this little trick thats gonna really change the way we think of food, get this guys: I take two pieces of bread, a piece of cheese, and a piece of meat and stack it together.. I call this wonderful new life shaping discovery "The meat-and-cheese-on-bread" I really think it's gonna change how we eat!
I can see a nice distributed implementation for burst-searching - a "mod_ephemera" module for apache.
:)
The module would count words/phrases most commonly served (less tags and the top-n most common words in the language-encoding), then serves out the top-10 as HTTP header messages. That way, the results are unobtrusive and easy to recover.
Of course, this approach would inevitably be easy to skew/cheat. Anyway, that's my sixpeneth
...Yahoo, today, was accused of seeding 2.5 million user blogs with keywords designed to influence/fool/skew robots that attempt to identify what's cool by automatically searching weblogs for so called 'word bursts'.
I guess this pretty much lays to rest the article about how nerds don't work to be popular. We automate it!
To answer your question: yes. He even looks surprisingly like Screech (he went into pornos, didn't he?).
They have a realtime search mechanism that can search within Chat rooms also , and TV and radios streams. (Kevin Kelly is on the Board). Used to be a downloadable personal edition. there is a free trial. Not a plug !!! , they became a corporate (financial and others) company , turning back on "Free Information Now" roots. but at least it works :)
http://www.relegence.com
It would be foolish to look at whats on blogs as being whats popular. If there was a sudden burst of people blogging about palladium, it would be foolish to mistake it for being popular. Instead, a burst of mentionings really means more along the lines of what is a hot topic. Well, at least IMHO.
YOU SUCK BALLS!
Word Bursts? Back in my day we called these cliches, I guess that was the old craze.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Sounds like a combination of Google's Zeitgeist and LiveJournal's MemeTracker. In other words, nothing that new.
It's also the basis for Computational Lexicography. Doing analysis on large corpora. One of the interests people have in this field is introduction of new words in society. The field used to use corpora such as the British National Corpus, but since the explosion of the Web, sites such as Google can far exceed that size. Weblogs are simply a good example of a more natural form of language. The interesting thing would be not so much to find new trends through words... but if we can truly solve the whole natural language parsing problem and use such information to extract higher-level knowledge
The analysis only works if your tool doesn't start modifying the data you are analyzing. If this thing ever caught on, it would quickly become meaningless, because everybody wants to be part of whatever craze is going on. Every morning you check which words are hip, you put them on your website... etc. etc.
You are right about feedback: the buzz would become a terrible din. That said, it is a cool idea.
Congratulations! Now we are the Evil Empire
I've been using this technique for years... We partially developed it at Opion, now part of Intelliseek, and I'm currently using it as one of a number of methods to find out what's going on in developer communities. It's not necessarily even all that clever, since the data are readily available by comparing the statistics that search engines inherently create.
Nick
It's no secret that the most commonly searched item on the internet is pronography. Only once has this top ranking ever been dethroned - September 11, 2001. It returned to the top spot shortly thereafter. So, by examining web logs, we will find that - year after year - we are all interested in pornography. While this is likely the case, it is also a trapping of the medium through which the research is being conducted. You'll excuse my complete lack of surprise.
All you need is an advertising blitz that costs a few million dollars and you have created cool!
It's shameful what makes the news these days.
It came up with the words "dup" and "speling".
People who disagree with you are not automatically evil, greedy, or stupid.
Should have been entitled "Nerds Find Automatic Method to Enable Them to Talk to Other People." I have this picture in my head of some poor guy who is a social outcast that wants to figure out a way to be able to talk to a girl about things she might be interested in.
In Republican America phones tap you.
Many of the Google searches I do are just trying to find out if anyone has found a fix for bizarre problems in software products. This is not quite the same as finding out what I find to be popular!
I can't think of any of the details, so if anyone has them, please post links. There is an art exhibit talked about in the latest issue of Linux Journal that describes an art exhibit that is a wall of tiny little lcd displays.
This wall changes often. The LCD's have messages culled from the internet in real time. I haven't seen the exhibit, just the picture on the cover of the magazine, but it seems like an interesting endeavor that is slightly akin to the artcile.
There are ads that are based on very idea of anti-coolness or repulsivenes. Like old benetton ads that were there to shock people.
I find the idea of using the forementioned website as an ad figure as repulsing... but let me ask who of us does not remember the address of forementioned site.
If a product could sell even if its ads were repulsive (ie. Benetton sold clothes with pictures of shirts used by people who were violently slain), using web address named like tagline for the product with content as repulsive as in forementioned site, and using the adress as un-responsibly as the trolls here do, the campaign could yield really good results.
In dream society, people could be given the ability to mod replies. In real life, it would be disaster.
to get the kids that "Beowulf cluster" i keep hearing about
No Sig For You
Of course I meant, "all your sport are belong to us." How embarrassing.
Keeping All Your Base parodies correct since AD 2002.
The approach could also be applied to sifting through other types of information. Identifying word bursts within email messages sent to a company's customer support address might help maintenance staff spot a major new problem.
/dev/null (through the filter of course).
I'm sure customer support employees are going to love this idea... This way you can keep up an appearance of actually having read the customer emails, while really just redirecting to
"I don't know that Atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots." -George H.W. Bush
I attended a conference last year, where they proposed a similar method to find trends in scientific fields, and more importantly, link them and predict future connections. For instance, when words from two unrelated fields start showing up associated in many papers, there is possibly a trend for those fields to meet and merge in the near future. Of course Informatics doesn't replace traditional methods, because it needs the input data, but it's a helpful tool.
So, words like evildoers, misunderestimated, and axis of evil are now cool?
http://github.com/gbook/nidb
If done in real-time it could be very valuable to a company to probe current trends and alter commercial plan and demographic target for their products...
Its a cool thing from a tech. aspect , but I'm not quite sure I like it.... kind of 1984:ish feeling all over it...
http://www.intellipool.se/ - Intellipool Network Monitor
Oh great. Just what we need. "Well, after careful analysis computer analysis with my powerful algorithms, I have concluded that break-dancing is now cool. I will be the first nerd in history to be atop this new trend."
Now we have the facts to say, "Dude, that's so 2001".
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
So, in this article, the examples are:
The words 'militia', 'British' and 'savages' were used a lot around the time the American 'militia' tended to fight the 'British' and what they called the 'savages'.
The word 'depression' was used a lot during the 'depression'.
The word 'atomic' was used a lot during the cold war, and 'Vietnam' was used a lot during the Vietnam war.
I am utterly at a loss as to how such a seemingly interesting field as tracking word usage (well, it interests me) could possibly yield such stupefyingly, numbingly, almost frighteningly obvious and dull results.
I can only assume the true significance of Dr. Kleinberg's results was simply too terrifying to be revealed...
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
Individual words will be useful showing some trends, but maybe counting phrases or how n-tuples of words could be better (AND harder). Sometimes "what's cool" is not a single isolated word.
With common words the language or the way society express itself could change in a way that doing simple word counting not show, at least, not show clearly.
Our definition of "cool" is the output of a computer analysis of weblogs then sit there wondering why nerds are so unpopular?!?
Cool doesn't necessarily have to be unknown, but how could it be determined by an algorithmic formula? Common does not mean cool.
...do something similiar on yahoo already? how do they figure out their buzz index? because i thought it was based on buzzwords. mind you, its buzz words in hyperlink format, but its still the same concept i think
Gentlemen...BEHOLD!
-Dr. Weird
This isn't going to show what's popular in our Culture. It's going to show what's popular in the web logging sub-culture.
I doubt there's that much of an overlap that the latter is an indicator for the former.
Google's Zeitgeist is a much better tool since it's analyzing what the general web populace is looking for. I think that would be a more accurate indicator of current web culture trends.
Still, neither are good indicators for our culture as a whole since they only reflect the interests of those who have ready access to a computer. The Zeitgeist is getting better all the time as more and more come online.
obviously no deficiencies vs. no obvious deficiencies
Is this news considered "new"? This is exactly what Amazon did in order to forecast what book titles would sell the most money. They became the biggest web retailer because of this very same idea -- but many years ago. And now somebody at Cornell copies the idea but uses weblogs instead of IRC and newsgroups and suddenly he's "clever"? I know lots of people are complaining that the information gleamed from this is not useful; but it is! It's an amazing way to forecast what will sell.
The example given is totally unimpressive: analyzing State of the Union messages, "In the years that immediately followed the American Revolution, for example, sudden bursts in the use of words such as "militia", "British" and "savages" are found. From 1930 to 1937 a spike in the use of the word "depression" is seen. And from 1949 to 1959 "atomic" is the word with the greatest "burstiness". Later in the 20th century, words such as "Vietnam", "Soviet", "communist" and "Afghanistan" increase sharply in usage." What a surprise. No tenth-grade history student would have ever guessed.
Equally appalling is the suggested "use:"
"For example, identifying word bursts in the hundreds of thousands of personal diaries now on the web could help advertisers quickly spot an emerging craze."
See Shurtape's web site for a letter explaining to distributors that they have shifted all production to three popular consumer products that lead times on every other kind of duct tape is increasing to eight weeks... If only Shurtape had analyzed the burstiness of the words "duct tape" in blogs would they have been able to anticipate the spike in demand?
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
They'll find that most things that hit the slashdot frontpage are now twice as cool as they were before.
eg:
Dec 10, 1998
Nov 21, 2002
what's george michel and a pair of wellies got in common?
They both get sucked off in blogs.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Remember the story a couple days ago about how /. geeks always got the tar beat out of them in high school? Your post is a good example of why.
.... one more time why don't you. And I quote,
"For example, identifying word bursts in the hundreds of thousands of personal diaries now on the web could help advertisers quickly spot an emerging craze."
Gonfonit!!! Why does cool new social technology have to be related to ways to help people sell things to Americans! Why is it okay for us to be considered a nation of consumers, otherwise basically useless biological skinsacks?!
I'll just strap my wallet to my chest with duct tape now and write my social security number in huge numbers on the back of my t-shirt for fast credit checks.
This, in the state it is presented in the article, is absolutely useless and obvious. I mean, proving that during the beginning of the Atomic Era, the word "atomic" was very common, or that during the war in Vietnam, "Vietnam" was a common word, is just making the evident more evident. It only proves that people tend to talk about what is happening at their time.
If they were able to preview any of this, say, trends, it could mean something. But, don0t you think that, if you are able to find many occurences of a word, it means that it is already a trend?
This is way it is difficult to foresee the future, because you don't have lots of newspapers talking about it (just joking).
The burst could be something like: war has broke out in Iraq. Hey, just turn on radio or go to cnn and you get it.
One of the use I can think is that the source of information come from individual. For example, if someone in a location A suddenly has stomachache and dizziness, and they complain about it, this could alert the official of something serious going on.
Another is the terorist activity, which the US gov't already use this method to find out if there's possible teriorist attack. So, it turns out that the idea is nothing new.
I can think of two now defunct internet startups that did this like four years ago. One was a financial analysis tool that looked for stock symbols on particular financial chat boards. The other was based on usenet posts.
If I wasn't going senile I would remember their names.
Like harvesting the info about some (rand(10)+15) year old person writing bullshit about (boyfriends|girlfriends|music|movies|stupid online quizes|webrings) with a site design that's usually so horrible they could be succesfully sued for crimes against huminity. All the marketing companies would encounter is the hype they created a few days before the harvest. So it might work to check if hypes/trends work out, but looking at "blogs" (the very word disgusts me) for something new an innovative is about as futile as trying to comprehend Bush' ramblings. The few remaining web logs or journals, as I prefer to call them without retching, are mainly technical. What trends are they going to squeeze out of the journal of a team of developers who want to keep the outside world up to date about what has happened lately? That such and so compiler sucks? That the network admin is a bitch? That the coffee tastes like sewage waste?
Heck, if any of those marketing companies are GOOD, they'll MAKE their own trends, not ride around on the succes of others.
Hate me!
I ran a system from my home computer that searched for 130 key words over major news sites. It came up with some interesting results. A variety of words such showed clear relationship to rise & fall of markets (Treasury bonds, EUR/US$). It was fun while it lasted.
Data from state of the union addresses here.
Out of the six billion people on the planet, only 3 percent can afford one. Of those that can afford one, half decide they actually want one. Combine that half with the lonely few in cyber cafes and markets and you have the world's top spenders in one place, perfect for advertisers.
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
Web Log 'Word Bursts' Could Identify New
and thought it must just go through blogs looking for long rambling outburts about black helicopters, FBI, greys and aluminium beanies. Blimey, that's half the bloggers out there - you don't need a program to identify the crazies!
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
Well, that idea was my entry attempt for the google programming contest, inpired by the Google Zeitgeist which I personally find was too infrequent (and not to say static).
But finally they've put exactly that system for use in Google news. Keywords that suddenly appear in many news sources get sent to the top of the front page. That's where I learnt of Columbia, a few minutes after it happened, and the first headlines didn't make sense at first.
So as usual, just search google !
Non-Linux Penguins ?
I've noticed that certain words and phrases come and go in the news media, and sometimes other areas. For a while a few years ago, I was seeing the phrase vis-a-vis (I forgot an accent somewhere) all over the place. I even had a history professor at the time who couldn't use the word often enough. But I haven't seen it used for years now.
One thing I've been noticing recently is `N.B.' I don't really know what it means, but people use it to insert extra comments when writing or updating something.
It readily recognizes bursts of "Bork! Bork! Bork!" on important news sites.
Read more on this technological development!
That green slime had it coming.
Why did this get modded as a troll? Ninnle Linux really is the next big craze! After all, Linus himself has endorsed the kernal! Linux is ALWAYS on topic for /., especially Ninnle!
The last thing we need is to make him 'popular' again, I lost 3 hours of productivity to that piece of spam
I wonder how long before this can be done real time enough to really make this useful.
About 3 weeks after the patent expires.
* Note: I don't actually know if the guy patented the idea, this is a joke.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
Perhaps this emerging trend early warning system could be used to prevent such tragedies as the chronic overuse of the word "uber."
The first time I remember seeing "uber" being used was in the days when Microsoft's plan for world domination was described as "Windows uber alles." Since then, it's snowballed and these days, the word has been so overused it's simply become an annoying cliche.
If only we'd had an early warning system back then, we might have been able to prevent the uber-ification of Slashdot.
The NSA has used this very concept for years to do forensics. Roll back the histogram enough to find the first instance of a topic and chances are, you have found a suspect. For instance, on 9-12 roll back the histogram of gathered intel regarding planes and NYC and you have a few good suspects.
"I have an odd craving to whisper about those few frightful hours in that ill-rumored and evilly shadowed seaport of dea
Of course this is spun as something new for marketers. I doubt that they will ever find an algorithm for 'cool'. If you are marketing to kids, just hire some kids to do your marketing. duh.
Milhouse: Maybe we should put it on the internet?
Bart: No! we need to get it to people with opinions that really matter!
http://www.remix.net/
How many people are talking about a 'paradigm shift' this week?
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.
In our industry, we have a practice called "testing". This is where we run our code on "test cases" and check that it performs as we expect it to perform. The fact that it does indeed find "Depression" during the 1930's is a good thing; it implies that the code extracts useful markers from unstructured text. We should be unimpressed if it failed to do so, not when it's succeeded.
"No shit" code is a good thing. Just think about the all-too-common alternative.
However, blogging is cool, because regular blogging may prevent colon cancer. Frankly, there's nothing I enjoy more in the morning than sitting down with the newspaper and a cigarette, proceeding to take a lengthy blog.
Face it, the Internet is dead. The remaining core users are hardly leveragable.
Best Buy can have you arrested
Why do you think this would be useful. Enough time is already wasted on the "latest thing". We need some gadget which tends to start people thinking, not to identify what is making them stop thinking.
It looks for the occurance of the word recession in major newspapers, and it's a pretty good predictor (better than most economists).
Unfortunately, a lot of the related articles are subscribed content.
I'll just strap my wallet to my chest with duct tape now
So that's where all the duct tape went.
Man, it's hard to finish a good homebrew anything without duct tape.
Keep your packets off my GNU/Girlfriend!
Given the current craze for "trackback"/"pingback" type mechanisms, the vast majority of blogs have primarily become metablogs, linking back and forth to each other, blogging on the blog entries of others in a huge ring, creating a misleading and misrepresentative perception of mutual support for lowest common denominator viewpoints.
/. : Very little new to discover - lots of rallying around existing views which are well-known, not necessarily correct, and often not even objective.
/. itself.
Which is to say that the vast majority of blogs have become a lot like
I suspect a tool such as the one this thread is discussing could do no better than a standard search tool, and might even do worse, artifically inflating its impressions of what's new and hot because of its special knowledge of blog structure and content. A standard search engine, faced with the same web pages, would just come up with a lot of hits. A "craze finding" tool would draw regularly invalid conclusions from the supposed patterns it finds within those hits. Worse yet, its conclusions, if published widely enough, would likely only serve to further inflate certain viewpoints. Again, much like
My news sites, Infobreakfast and newsQuakes have been using a similar algorithm for the last 3 years to produce a useful summary view of world news.
And next week he discovers that water is wet, death sucks and Republicans are evil.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
Don't forget that Kleinberg was the one who came up with the hubs and authorities algorithm (essentially the Google model) at the same time as Page and Brin.
Before any dictionaries in tennis shoes pipe up.
http://www.remix.net/
What will future searchers make of Slashdot (and by extension, the net as a whole), what with the waxing and waning in the popularity of Natalie Portman, Hot Grits, Soviet Russia, All your base, gonads and strife, MEEEEEEPT!, and the ever-present FIST PROST.
This is a significant tool for the post-information age. It could reliable guage the effectiveness of viral marketing. It could also intercept sub-culture developments before they become popular, and introduce them to the general population in association with a corporate brand.
Imagine if Nike or Pepsi, or *shudder* Microsoft, had caught the "All Your Base" thing on the upswing. They'd have a better slogan than the top down "Dude, you're gettin a Dell".
The REAL jabber has the user id: 13196
What you do today will cost you a day of your life
The last time I checked blogdex the most popular topics by far were blogs themselves. I was kind of surprised to see that bloggers are now wondering whether people think they are nerds or not.
Actually if you filter stuff like the above out blogdex really does look like its telling you what people are thinking about these days.
It seems inevitable that as information technology, anthropology, marketing and research technologies (and everything else) are brought to bear on the tasks of predicting, identifying, and capitalizing on an emerging fad ASAP, this will inspire the creative forces that generate new culture to avoid generating it. Creative forces (artists, "the hip", those who do this kind of stuff) want to be differently expressive. If ideas are co-opted for mass exposure and profit as soon as they begin to emerge, those ideas will stop emerging. Those creative forces will inevitably learn to generate anti-fads (new, different, difficult to co-opt in the current culture), whatever that turns out to be.
The requirement to exploit emerging creative difference will change those fads to something else.
Let's figure out what it will be and sell it!
once poeple know the rules that determine what a "word burst" is and when it's happening, then tools will be developed to artificially inflate desired word burts
The Three Theorems of Psychohistorical Quantitivity:
1. The population under scrutiny is oblivious to the existence of the science of Psychohistory.
2. The time periods dealt with are in the region of 3 generations.
3. The population must be in the billions (±75 billions) for a statistical probability to have a psychohistorical validity.
Carnivore was so they'd have the edge on being cool.
As you can see, even with advanced technology and a huge corpus of email and search requests, coolness is all about the mirrored shades and gold embroidery.
Keep your packets off my GNU/Girlfriend!
This is already being done:
t tp://blogdex.media.mit.edu/. com
o ol /
http://www.daypop.com
http://www.popdex.com
h
http://groups.google
And we all already know what it can be used for:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/c
Damn we been sussed!
Old COBOL programmers never die. They just code in C.
I wonder how long before 5000 or so scientology blogs spontaneously appear overnight at and we discover that the latest craze is Dianetics, the Modern Science of Mental Health(tm)
Doesn't Dilbert already have a copyright on that one?
Hello???
/. nerds ever heard of the Waypath Project?
Haven't you
What a great opportunity for culture jamming! We just need a few thousand webloggers to start using weird words designed to repel "normal" people.
Obviously this could backfire and we could actually start a real trend. So, I propose that the first words we need to put out are ( geek || nerd ) && sexy. (And if you understood that, you must be hot stuff.) I'm willing to take this risk if you are.
I wonder how long this would be able to be measured accurately before marketers begin building blogs that tout a 'new' fad, to get noticed? Perhaps it'll become just another tool of viral marketing for the big folks?
Who put this thing together? Me, that's who.
See http://www.infobreakfast.com/ which does something similar for news items - and has a very terse, wireless-friendly, interface.
Problems worthy of attack prove their worth by hitting back.
Lindon Johnson "invented" NEW-QUEUE-LAR weapons. And when was the last time any politician pronounced it NEW-KLEE-ARE? (Maybe that's not such a bad thing -- now you can tell the politicans from the physicists... no wait: you always could -- because the politicians made sense.)
...is all about bragging about your method of searching online blogs... ...cribbing memes... ...and knowing where to find all of the State of the Union addresses since 1790...
--Blair
"AAAAaaaaaaaayyyyyyyyyyyyyy..."
Only a true geek would need a search engine to determine what is considered "cool".
Geez, this story was written Feb. 3 and was posted on /. Feb. 19??
John Kerry is a Joke!
I just tested it on feeds from the major news media. The highest bursti-ness readings are on the words "Bush", "Iraq" and "terrorism." The software package I'm using was developed by a team of millions of independent non-programmers, and is called "Duh!".
I would like to remind you that second place is FIRST FAILURE. YOU HAVE LIKEWISE FAILED IT!
One god, one market, one truth, one consumer.
A prominent russian mathematician A.T. Fomenko from Moscow State University has already proposed and applied the method in question. His goal was to reveal hidden relations in the global history. The "citation index" of certain words would signal some important event like a battle or a outstanding personality. By connecting this words and the dates assigned to them in the ancient texts one could find new relations or use it as experimental evidence for historical theories.
There are couple books of him even in English that are a great fun to read even for non-scientists. Check an abriged version of one of them.
Here is the title of his fundamental work published:
Empirico-Statistical Methods of the Analysis of the Narrative Numerical Material & the Applications of the Problem of Dating
ISBN: 0792326059 - Hardcover - List Price: $266.50
Publisher: Kluwer Academic Publishers - Published Date: 01/01/1994
Author: A. T. Fomenko
...a stunned silence fell upon the hall.
If they buy Blogger, they can integrate the sorting/statistical analysis *into* the Blogger network, put it on a Google interface ... connect the nets, and oila:
The answer to the question of 'when will it be realtime?' is moot.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
... it's called the National Debt.
If you don't keep consuming, and don't keep spending money (and thus moving material through the American universe), your government gets into trouble with the people it owes money to.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
John Naisbitt did this back in 1982, scouring word frequency in various periodicals to come up with Megatrends.
It's a sensible idea, and really can be forward looking, in a sense, as trends begin by deed, but spread by word.
Kottke.org something something.. COOL!!!!!!! ;-P HAHA IRONY!!!
theonion.com something something FUNNY!!!!!!
Which Garbage Pail Jr Kid are U?! TRY IT!! I'M SMELLY MCGEE!!!!
I'm gonna move out at 18!!! MOM SUCKS!!!!
New Homestar Runner this week. SO COOL!!!!
Dog bites man
IE update out!! AWESOME PRIVACY CONTROL DUDEZ
My mom totally hates my hair!!! SUCH A BITCH!!!
Wow you can block pop-unders!! KEWL ITS FREE!!
Flash RULEZ!! This movie is wack ya'all!!!
Buffy something something!!! !!!!!!
Man bits dog back!! SUPER IRONY!!
etc
so i guess there are times when saddam hussien and bin laden are cool...!!!!!
wish i was cool too.....
anonymous freeze
The lunatic is in my head
"Word bursts" is too boring a term, moreover it's not very academic. I suggest "blogolalia" instead.
-kgj
The algorithms used to identify these sudden bursts are relatively simple, but very powerful, says Christos Papadimitriou, at the University of California at Berkeley. OK, show us! Why all the talk and no examples? If these simple algorithms exists, why doesn't the article give us a site that actually uses these algorithms, so we can see what's popular today for ourselves?
OK, show us! Why all the talk and no examples?
If these simple algorithms exists, why doesn't the article give us a site that actually uses these algorithms, so we can see what's popular today for ourselves?
this show had a very disturbing quote.
something to the effect of "teens today are like africa, they're just waiting to be colonized"
wrong on so many levels...
It (tickle-me elmo) might (tickle-me elmo) show (tickle-me elmo) certain (tickle-me elmo) old (tickle-me elmo) toys (tickle-me elmo) are (tickle-me elmo) making (tickle-me elmo) a (tickle-me elmo) major (tickle-me elmo) comeback (tickle-me elmo) when (tickle-me elmo) really (tickle-me elmo) someone (tickle-me elmo) is (tickle-me elmo) cheating.
If the masses can keep you down, you're not the Ubermensch.
The ultimate origin is lost in antiquity, but it has to do with an old troll fixation with Natalie Portman, whom the trolls wanted to see naked and petrified, so they could pour hot grits down her pants. Or possibly, they wanted to get her naked and petrified by pouring hot grits down her pants. At this point, I'm just going to say "hot grits" several more times, to create a local hot spot around the "hot grits" phrase, in case anyone ever does an analysis of phrase usage frequency in terms of "hot grits" in this thread - just to keep this comment on topic for both hot spot analysis and "hot grits".
The REAL jabber has the user id: 13196
What you do today will cost you a day of your life
...which shows he's got to be on a tax fiddle
Sorry, couldn't resist...