Re: The Human Memeome Project

Michael Lorrey (retroman@together.net)
Thu, 17 Sep 1998 17:59:22 -0400

Joe Jenkins wrote:

> ---Michael Lorrey <retroman@together.net> wrote:
>
> > I don't think so. Since sex/reproduction is the prime motivator for
> the
> > vast majority of humanity, leaving it out is stupid, puritanical and
> > disingenuous.
>
> It *doesn't* exist, I was making a proposal to create the "Human
> Memeome Project". Also, If you don't exclude adult sites, your data
> mining effort will conclude that the most popular of all human memes
> is "free nude teen pics".

Considering that we are heading for 6 billion souls on this planet, it seems to me that that estimate is right on. 'nude teens' may be the most popular meme that is running through peoples minds.

> The next 100 down the list will be similar.
> There is plenty of adult information in personal web sites and I
> believe that to be more representative of a human individual than
> people looking to make a quick buck. Those sites represent someone's
> effort to influence others to spend, not someone's effort to publish
> their personal memes on the web.
>
> ---Michael Lorrey <retroman@together.net> wrote:
>
> > You are basically wanting to catalogue an index for a super-search >
> engine.
> >
>
> No, lets say you wanted to collect a snapshot of a specific class of
> memes e.g. (idioms/buzz words/catch phrases/figures of speech). Since
> most of these phrases are between three and six words, you could start
> searching for multiple matches from the greater web of every group of
> three to six words you encounter on the web site that is currently
> being scanned. Certainly, you would need a super-search engine as a
> tool to accomplish this. But the output would be a list of catch
> phrases that are common in the meme pool.

No you don't need to use a search engine. Since search engines already run off of indexes, you use the indexes to do an incidence count of how frequently any word occurs within 3 words of any other word, as well as the most frequent word sequences. You then create a search engine that runs off of your new 'catch phrase' index to provide meme searching capability.

Mike Lorrey

>
>
> Joe Jenkins
> joe_jenkins@yahoo.com
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