Unique Strings / Memes

The proposition, as explained on memography.org, is simple. Create a globally unique string or meme ID. Paste this string into relevant web pages. Wait for search engines to crawl the pages. Then use the meme ID to search with 100% precision and recall. And you can even create an aboutness page to define your meme, so others can use it properly.

The above is from a very interesting post over at findability.org titled The Memetic Web which references memography.org. I didn’t have a chance to look into memography.org much directly, so what I’m responding to is the post on findability.

If I hadn’t had experience with my own name and making up globally unique strings, both by accident and on purpose, I might think it was more difficult than it actually is. To add a little evidence beyond my own experience, the people who run the site Connotea, which is for sharing academic references a la social bookmarking, wrote up a case study of their own service where they found that 14% (460) of the unique tags (3359) on Connotea were used by more than one person - that is, 86% of tags are unique strings within that system (!). Although it’s a relatively small sample I think it’s fascinating.

I use one tag on del.icio.us that I’d like to be more popular (or at least not unique), metablogosphere, which I use for sites that visualize or search in some fashion a large number of blogs. I was using this tag more when I was doing a research project on blogs, but I’ve never blogged or otherwise promoted metablogosphere. When I first started on blog research I thought it would be presumptuous to announce my ‘new’ term, and I was waiting to find the ‘real’ term. Also, how many people are actually interested in this? And would they notice and use this term? The ‘risk’ didn’t seem to outweigh the ‘reward’ - although that’s a dramatic way to put it.

Another case is aoir6 - which my class and I proposed as a tag for the Association of Internet Researchers sixth annual meeting. We used the tag for blog posts via Technorati Tags, for bookmarks in del.icio.us and for photos on Flickr. The string aoir6 didn’t exist 6 months ago (and not much beyond 3 months ago) and I did a search on Google just now and got 9,910 results, all related to the conference from what I can see.

So, in short, I can see what’s interesting about globally unique strings. My examples above have been related to tags, and I see the subject of globally unique strings and tagging as very densely intertwined.

One problem I see is that people get attached to their inventions, so if you have competing strings for a particular concept (i.e. someone has something that already means what I mean by metablogosphere) and I go out and promote my string, then you perhaps have 100% personal / sphere of influence accuracy but not a truly global type of tool. Maybe that’s not such a problem since it’s silly to think we could have a truly global agreement.

The corollary problem is that others start using a string with a different definition in mind. This is what has happened to folksonomy, which is somewhat vexing to it’s originator. This is a much more sticky problem. Does it mean what the person who originated it intended, or does it mean what most people intend when they use it? Being a bottom-up kind of person I favor the latter, but probably not if it were my invention :)