Hello. I've been lurking this board for a while and decided it's time to take some action. I believe we are lacking some tools to be really effective.
Our memetics are currently an art, not a science. Stuff like UI design used to be similar: an artist makes a design, changing a few things until his boss thinks it's good. Nowadays businesses constantly iterate on their websites using techniques like A/B testing to optimize some clearly defined performance indicators (e.g. the number of users who buy a product). No anecdotal evidence - only numbers.
Of course memes are a bit different. A bad meme will naturally die and a strong meme will survive. It's evolution at work! And if this is evolution, then memetics are genetic engineering. We don't wait until a good meme evolves: we artificially create it. But how can we know if the memes are any good? If it is our memes affecting the society or maybe someone else is? And where are the other memes originating?
So how do we do that? This is what this thread is for.
It's best to starting with something as simple as possible. I would like to have a way to track how fast an image is moving through the internet, something like a timeline for each image with info about the websites it appeared on. If the image got popular (e.g. appeared on 100+ sites in a day) we analyze the most common words used to see how different groups are reacting.
The biggest problem with that is scale. Crawling the whole internet is impossible. We can restrict to "only" common social media websites, online media and chans. That's still way too big without a decent budget for a proper cluster (and some pain in the ass because twitter sure doesn't want to be data mined). Perhaps we could cheat a bit and crawl only what google images or tineye gives us for a specific image.
What do you think about this idea anons? Any different things you would find useful.