Say what you Meme - Sex, Lies and VideoTape

As we are quite heavily involved in Interactive Media, especially Interactive Advertising systems for Telcos with STL Partners recently, (Buy the Report out next week)...we are very aware of the impact of the feedback loop, or "clickstream". However, context to your personal clickstream is added by the clickstreams in your social network, as well as people you don't know but whose clickstreams look a lot like yours.

At some point we need to aggregate all these disparate clicks and try to make some sense of them, and rresolve them into discrete units - we use the term "meme", as the original idea of a meme (not just the chain tag of the blogosphere) is very close.

The meme as a unit simply provides a convenient way of discussing "a piece of thought copied from person to person", regardless of whether that thought contains others inside it, or forms part of a larger meme (Wikipedia)

This post was inspired by something I saw on Saul Klein's blog last night while preparing to go to the OpenCoffee today (great event, Saul - thanks again) where he compares fear and greed. Now Saul is a VC, so that is understandable - hmmm....very Machiavellian - where does Power fit in

However, as Interactive Media people we need different memes - Sex, Lies and Videotape seems to encapsulates the media as it is often understood. So, to use Saul's examples here are these memes as displayed in Nielsen Blogpulse:



Note that sex and lies track each other closely - the human condition?...........and in Google Trends:



See also that the difference is an order of magnitude between them - a Reverse Maslow Effect in fact....

But Saul does not go far enough. we, on the other hand, go too far - to envisage these 3 memes with all their linked memes - the memeplex - a Tag Cloud is useful - so here is the Technorati 30 day blog memecloud....



...and here is the Google Blogs one.



Plus ca change....anyway, thats enough Fun with Memes for one night. Next week......Memetic Algorithms


So what's this got to do with Interactive Advertising, I hear you ask. well, it all depends on whether you think the future of Ads is in Creation or Calculation. And who you think is going to Innovate the most....

And what's with the Elephants?