Waxy.org is the sandbox of Andy Baio, an independent journalist and programmer living in Portland, Oregon. I created Upcoming.org and some other stuff too.

Contact Me: log@waxy.org or waxpancake on AIM

Tracking the All Your Base Meme with Usenet

Posted Apr 29, 2002

It turns out that Google's Usenet archive is pretty useful for tracking the lifecycles of Internet fads.

August 25, 2004: At Nelson's request, the data has been updated to July 2004.

2000:
Aug: 0
Sep: 1
Oct: 0
Nov: 8
Dec: 26

2001:
Jan: 267
Feb: 3160
Mar: 7070
Apr: 3880
May: 2950
Jun: 2210
July: 1870
Aug: 1520
Sep: 1360
Oct: 1460
Nov: 1040
Dec: 1010

2002:
Jan: 964
Feb: 743
Mar: 990
Apr: 845
May: 599
Jun: 389
July: 585
Aug: 452
Sep: 422
Oct: 352
Nov: 270
Dec: 293

2003:
Jan: 249
Feb: 553
Mar: 367
Apr: 417
May: 165
Jun: 1390
July: 654
Aug: 706
Sep: 358
Oct: 221
Nov: 187
Dec: 169

2004:
Jan: 188
Feb: 223
Mar: 430
Apr: 298
May: 136
Jun: 110
July: 271

4 Comments (Add Yours)

Apr 30, 2002
9:01 AM

Phil wrote:

I was going to say that you could probably do something similar with daypop, although usenet is probably a slightly wider sample of net users as a whole. really, if you combined google groups, daypop, and were able to mine through hotmail, aol, and yahoo email traffic, you could probably track trends like this pretty exactly.

Apr 30, 2002
10:12 AM

Andy Baio wrote:

The problem with Daypop is that it's not currently possible to track trends through time, since they don't list the date that a site was first mentioned on a weblog; only the date that the site was last cached.

Blogdex doesn't have that problem, though.

Apr 30, 2002
11:25 AM

Andre Torrez wrote:

HSX.com for memes?

Apr 30, 2002
11:34 AM

Andy Baio wrote:

Hmm, not a bad idea. It'd be easy to track memes with a combination of Google/Usenet/Daypop, if you could narrow the meme to a single key phrase (e.g. "all your base") or a URL (e.g. http://www.hamsterdance.com/).

I'll be sure to start work on that in my copious free time.

Waxy Links

November 18, 2008

Bike Hero, biking a Guitar Hero level in the real world — most likely a commercial viral, and maybe even fake, but does it matter? beyond awesome

Chuck Klosterman reviews Chinese Democracy — mostly posting this just to beat Rex to it

The A.V. Club's 27 popular websites that became books — though they missed Belle de Jour, The Washingtonienne, Fucked Company, Fark, and ZUG

Speed Guitar goes to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art — every hour, on the hour, for one solid minute of metal complete with gothic arch and smoke machine

MGMT's "Kids" on the iPhone Ocarina — "the iPhone Ocarina officially replaces the recorder as the nerdiest instrument I can play"

Mena Trott responds to Valleywag article about their Disneyland vacation — my favorite was Space Mountain Snob

LIFE Magazine photo archive hosted by Google — millions of high-res photos, most never published

Amazon launches CloudFront, their pay-as-you-go CDN — very complementary with S3

November 17, 2008

John Hodgman, Jonathan Coulton, and the Long Winters perform "Tonight You Belong to Me" — "Thank you, normal-sized man."

Jerry Yang stepping down from Yahoo's CEO post — it never really fit him well, though I'll miss his e.e. cummings memos

Woman asks Apple community about an unusual iPhone glitch — no, raunchy photos don't accidentally attach themselves to outbound email

Greasemonkey script to pull WikiDashboard visualization into Wikipedia — I made a LazyWeb plea for this last week, and Paul Irish came through

Lee Byron's Fireflies, anaglyph 3D game for Mac — part of Kokoromi's Gamma 3D showcase of anaglyph games

Flickr Boundaries, tool to explore Flickr's shapefiles — read Tom Taylor's entry for more information

Cooking Mama, the Unauthorized PETA Edition — a strangely obscure target for their attention, with a petition to write to the game's publisher (via)

Boing Boing launches gaming blog, Offworld — good writing in a nice design from Brandon Boyer, former news editor of Gamasutra

"Violet" wins the Interactive Fiction Comp 2008 — play it online; glancing at the charts, it looks like Buried in Shoes was the most divisive

Trailer for J.J. Abrams' Star Trek prequel — looks surprisingly good, but I'm a sucker for origin stories; I even liked Enterprise

What would Depression 2009 look like? — Tim sums up the thought-provoking Boston Globe article

The Pirate Bay hits 25 million simultaneous peers — that's not unique people, but concurrent connections; Napster peaked at 26M users

Peter Hirschberg releases Adventure as a free iPhone app — related: Chasing Ghosts will finally be released on ~~BitTorrent~~ Showtime in December (via)

The Big Picture on the California wildfires — also: first-person coverage on Twitter and YouTube, like this freeway on fire and aftermath

Tim-Tams available at Target until March, first time available in the U.S. — best chocolate cookies ever, the Tim Tam Slam is a chocolaty revelation (via)

JS-909, a Javascript drum machine without Flash — through a hack, it even works in IE 6

November 14, 2008

Esquire's hosting Between, the new two-player networked game by Jason Rohrer — from the creator of Passage

"What's that buzzing noise from my BBQ?" — he thought he was killing a few bees, but ends up annihilating an entire colony (via)

November 13, 2008

Kottke explains how to embed high-quality YouTube videos — I knew how to save, link, and change the default, but the embedding hack was new to me

Web 2.0 Origami — lazyweb, please build a converter that creates folding patterns from an uploaded image

Pixar's Burn-E short on YouTube — here's an interview with the director

Valleywag folded into Gawker, all but Owen Thomas laid off — I won't miss it; they hurt a lot of good people and interesting projects in the quest for pageviews (via)

Tracking the All Your Base Meme with Usenet

4 Comments (Add Yours)

Leave a comment