I fell asleep last night reading Malcom Gladwell's Tipping Point, how  
appropriate for this topic. 25 hipsters in the East Village in NYC  
wear Hush Puppies, within three years the brand has rebounded and is  
sold across the nation in malls once again. Love it. JibJab is  
another great meme. Now they are now retained by Budweiser. You might  
want to contact them and do a deal where you embed tracking data in  
the Flash "ads" and share the results with Budweiser and jibJab.

Memes are all about impressions based on downloads. Not much better  
tracking than how marketing firms track advertising on the side of a  
bus.

You can add in Search engine queries, like Google Zeitgeist.

Depends on your ultimate goal. Do you want to collect data on people  
who are exposed to memes? Track the memes themselves for become the  
point of origination?

Making memes is easy. We create them all the time at Corante (http:// 
www.corante.com/getreal for example) by flipping blog entry titles  
into phrases that eventually morph into something resembling memes.  
Not consumer-specific mind you.

Tracing memes that start out in blogs is going to be much more  
trackable than email due to trackback pings. If a meme shows up in a  
blog, it might get tagged in Technorati, show up in Del.icio.us or  
Furl. In parallel, it enjoys stronger GoogleJuice and LinkLove across  
the blogosphere and takes off from there. Many blogs have lat/long  
coordinates attached to them, but why does it matter where the person  
lives unless you are doing local marketing?


Dave Evans
Director, Online Dating & Discovery Research Advisory Service
www.corante.com/dating | +1 617-536-9938 | [log in to unmask]
Skype:relaxedguy



On Jun 17, 2005, at 10:19 PM, Ben Spigel wrote:

> I have a methodology problems I've been struggling with, and was  
> wondering if anyone on the list had dealt with this before.
>
> I'm studying how ideas spread over the internet and physical space,  
> things like internet 'memes' such as e-mail jokes, cartoons, think  
> "all your base belong to us." Unfortunately, there is no real way  
> to track these things. E-mails are anonomous and privite, so you  
> can't track where one of those e-mail jokes has been.
>
> In theory you could track IP addresses for web-site based things,  
> like flash cartoons, but there are a few problems with this. You  
> would need the IP logs, which are rerely saved and most websites  
> are lothe to give out information like that. If I could make my own  
> internet meme on demand, I wouldn't be sitting here talking to you  
> - I would be swimming in my pool of money. There are plenty of  
> viral ads out there which are specifically designed to collect  
> information about viewers, but I don't think marketing firms will  
> give out this kind of information to researchers.
>
> The only other way that I can think of would be to do a internet  
> based survey, basically asking "1) Have you seen this thing, 2) 
> where do you live," but in order to get good data it would need to  
> be huge, something very hard for an internet survey.
>
> Has anyone else successfully dealt with this problem or have any  
> ideas?
>
> Thanks,
> --------
> Ben Spigel
> Department of Geography
> University of Toronto
>