Combination Of Drigg And Memetracker

Hmmm. . . I'm not sure how well a digg-clone and memetracker would mesh from a UI perspective. The selection of articles by Memetrackers are driven generally by algorithms. A memetracker identifies memes (a collection of articles about a single subject) and tries to decide what's the most interesting memes and shows them. Digg type sites, on the other hand, show individual *articles* not *memes*. One shows a meme that's circulating, the other shows interesting articles. They're fairly different concepts. Both have their place but seem to be meeting somewhat different needs.

You could I guess have a digg site that displays memes (as automatically discovered by memetracker) and then lets users vote up or down different memes. That could work well perhaps.

Memetracker does do something like that implicitly. It counts how many clicks each article/meme gets and uses the click count to help decide what memes are most interesting. You could replace the click count with a voting widget.

Memetracker won't support this type of functionality out of the box but I'm designing Memetracker to be modular enough that something like you're describing -- a memetracker/digg combo -- could be added fairly simply.

Kyle,

A whole lot of good wishes for your project and everything. Thanks for the reply. It was elaborate and cleared a lot of air. And moreover, you have suggested an excellent way to circumvent the need for the integration of Drigg. I would certainly try to implement your suggestion and get back to bug you some time in future.

Hey Kyle,

I think kalcha has an interesting concept going.
What about using not only clicks on the Article/MeMe but also the number of votes via the Voting API (http://drupal.org/project/votingapi). This way each story could be voted on by users and you would know what articles should be promoted to the top of the page and which articles are the most interesting inside a meme.

This brings together the advantages of MeMe's and Digg in one. The problem with just using clicks is you'll find an article might have a great title but terrible content and this is something users can vote on.

I think the idea is interesting and potentially valuable -- but the UI would be difficult to perfect and creating digg/memetracker isn't my vision for memetracker. Anyone is, of course, welcome to write the votingapi integration themselves and submit patches which I will happily add.

I think this would be valuable, as it gives another metric to rank articles on, I'll work on a patch for this once I'm using MeMeTracker on a live site.

Cool! Be happy to help you when you get to that point.

WOW!

Sean Bannister and Kyle Mathews,

This is very appetising to know that my vague thought is even being considered for a patch. If that fructifies someday, I would be extremely thankful guys.

And Sean, I do feel that instead of utilising only the machine power, if a little human brain could also be thrown in, courtesy voting or an equivalent alternative like comments or something else, would be the best possible combination of a MEME and DIGG. Conceptually, it sounds much more powerful than Digg itself. I hope it sees the light of the day.

Thank You Very much.

Yes number of comments would be usefull as well.

This has got me wondering how people are going to use MeMeTracker and how developers can interact with MeMes and how exactly MeMeTracker will do things.
For example for the sites I plan to use MeMeTracker on I want MeMe's to be promoted to the frontpage if they are popular, this could be determined based on :
- How many related stories there are
- If they have a certain number of comments
- If they have a certain rating
- A mixture of all of these

Now MeMe's currently aren't nodes so I'm unsure what to do. Because I was thinking about using actions and triggers to achieve this promotion of items.

The other issue would be how are comments going to work with MeMes? Is each article going to have individual comments or will the MeMe have it's own node that is then commented on?

I'd really like the hear from you Kyle :)

RE integration of drigg, and of using the votingapi as part of memes --

Popularity and how content relates are two separate things -- the way these two items related would need to be very clearly articulated to make sure that end users got the results they thought they were going to get. So, while the voting api might have some usefulness with determining the longevity/interestingness of the meme, it would be of limited use in actually determining how/if an individual piece of content belongs in a meme.

Also, AFAIK, the voting api only works with nodes -- this means that for there to be any way to connect the voting api into the memetracker, it would need to work on imported content. While this isn't necessarily a bad thing, it is something that needs to be considered.

In short, while this is interesting functionality, the specific use case needs to be clarified -- Digg/Drigg is a community voting/rating platform, where the memetracker is more of an observer of what the community is doing when left to its own devices. The connection needs to be clarified before I would recommend devoting development hours to a solution.

In short, is see this as a lower priority than either removing the python dependency or improving the algorithm for spotting recommendations between content.

Hi Bonobo,

I agree that removing the python dependency and improving the algorithm is more important than integration with Voting API. However I do think the ability to display MeMes as nodes is rather important, and as soon as MeMes are nodes developers like myself can start integrating MeMes with other modules and writing documentation on how to build a killer MeMe tracker that not only displays great related content but the most interesting related content. Kyle has already said:

nodequeues [module] seems the way to go. It seems the simplest (and most logical) way to push memes into views (and from there all your Drupal memetracker dreams will come true).... .....For testing, I'm just going to create a very simple view that'll spit out the memes in a simple manner.

Also:

(remember the goal is to display the most interesting content -- if two people thought a meme worth writing about, odds are that meme is more interesting to the general community then a meme that only one person talked about) So the memetracker will weight links in meme clusters higher.

So in short, I can't wait for NodeQueue support so I can start writting modules and documentation that will help MeMeTracker display the best content to the community.

Hello, Sean,

The idea of memes as nodes is nothing new -- it came up in the planning stages for the project -- it has its advantages, certainly.

WRT votingapi integration, and nodequeue, and views2, it might actually be possible to do this without nodequeue, depending on how the voting criteria is set up -- views2 offers some powerful options here.

Also, to reiterate my earlier point:

It's interesting functionality, but, at least in this thread, the use case isn't sufficiently clear to support writing code to address it. I'm not saying that the use case doesn't exist, or that the general concept is without merit; I'm saying that, in this thread, it's not sufficiently clear.

Of course, working code demonstrates clarity better than words ever can :)

Link to earlier discussion: http://groups.drupal.org/node/10276#comment-33096

Oh hadn't seen that post, I think what this really comes down to is "to Node or not to Node, that is the Question". If each MeMe was a node I can see a heap of advantages.

- The ability to comment on a set of articles rather than an individual article
- Vote on MeMes
- Tag MeMes not just articles
- Views integration
- - Display the most commented MeMes at the top
- - Display the highest voted MeMes at the top

and this is just what I can think I'd use it for but the main thing is people could do whatever they want with MeMes.

Yeah, it does get existential :)

It also gets at the persistence of memes, and how much a meme should be rooted around a series of specific conversations in time --

"Node-ifying" a meme makes it a "real" thing, and moves memes toward finding related content as opposed to observing/detecting/presenting trends --

At the end of the day, it's all good -- and also largely related to Kyle's vision for what this will become.

Either way I have websites that needs MeMes as nodes and I'm certain I won't be the only one, so it's not a question of if it will happen it's a question of how it will happen, could be part of MeMeTracker so you have an option if you want nodes or not. or it might be another module that plugs into MeMeTracker.

Possibly a views include as well -- given that views2 can now display non-node content -- that might be a shorter road, or at the very least an interim step.