Futurismic

Some glorious and fascinating reportage-porn at memetracker that shows how news stories are taken up and how long they last and what their impact is:

They found a consistent rhythm as stories rose into prominence and then fell off over just a few days, with a “heartbeat” pattern of handoffs between blogs and mainstream media. In mainstream media, they found, a story rises to prominence slowly then dies quickly; in the blogosphere, stories rise in popularity very quickly but then stay around longer, as discussion goes back and forth. Eventually though, almost every story is pushed aside by something newer.

There is something truly wonderful about seeing this information laid out in such an intuitive manner. This kind of analysis of the growth, spread, and retention of ideas is certainly an area that will expand and grow over time.

[via Physorg, from MemeTracker]

I dare say a lot of you will have seen this already, but for the rest: Eric “Engines of Creation” Drexler has launched his own blog, Metamodern. [image courtesy Wikimedia Commons]

Drexler is one of the leading thinkers in molecular nanotech, so there’s one reason to follow along and see what he has to say. But Drexler has more to offer:

Metamodern isn’t intended to be “a blog about nanotechnology”; its scope includes broader issues involving technologies with world-changing potential. For example, looking well downstream in technology development, I will sketch the requirements for large-scale systems able to restore the atmosphere to its pre-industrial composition. Closer to hand, social software and the computational infrastructure of our society are high on the list.

I think we can safely assume that Futurismic readers will find something of interest in his output.

Hello, boys and girls. You may or may not have noticed that Futurismic had a bit of downtime today.

Our hosting company informs us that this is due to the site hogging CPU resources – which means there’s either a lot more of you reading than we thought, that something’s broken, or that someone somewhere is playing a game we Brits refer to as “silly buggers”.

However, until we can accurately determine the source of the problem, we need to take measures to make sure it doesn’t happen again. So if you notice anything odd or untoward here in the next week or so, please bear with us.

It may be that we’re forced to deactivate the comments at some point, but this will not be a permanent change by any means.

And please also rest assured we’re working hard on a long term solution to the problems, which we hope to be able to make an announcement about very soon.

Thanks for reading!

Doubtless after realising that the Futurismic team, as awesome as we are, just don’t have the resources to cover everything, the folk at Gawker Media have started a new science fiction blog, io9, headed up by none other than Annalee Newlitz. [Image lifted from i09 introductory post]

From the looks of it so far, they’re going to be covering all sorts of funky science fictional stuff, and not just the written fiction and plausible technogeekery we try to stick to here – so I’m guessing there’s room in your RSS reader for both. And as Scalzi points out, fandom will not be slighted lightly … still, they’re off to a good start from my point of view, with a post that faces the rotting elephant carcass in the room and points out six reasons that Star Trek should stay dead. Amen, brothers and sisters.

[tags]science fiction, blog, io9[/tags]

If you’re a long-time reader of Futurismic, you know we’ve recently made the switch to WordPress. In the spirit of embracing the new platform, we link to CommentPress 1.0, a WordPress theme that puts comments in a box that scrolls as you scroll, and lets you click on a paragraph to see comments related to that paragraph. They imagine lots of uses for CommentPress, but the one most interesting to me is the applicability to workshopping stories online. If you’re a writer, would you use something like CommentPress to solicit feedback on stories in progress? [o'reilly radar]