A new release of akarru went out today.
Lots of bugs fixed.

However, anyone who visits blogmemes will see that we have new features that are not in this release of akarrú. The thing is, the new features have to do with FeedBurner, and they are tightly tied to blogmemes data. We’re going to make that support more generic and fold it in later.

A bit of Blogmemes history

You can read the history of Meneame on Ricardo Galli’s blog, and it’s really interesting, because he has documented his process for us.
It’s interesting to me because I didn’t know Ricardo, and I didn’t know about his project while he was coding it.

The interesting part is that blogmemes published its first post on 12/07/2005 at 09:49 EST (US Eastern time, where the server is), and Meneame published its first story at more or less the same time.

Some have said that we started later or that we arrived late, when the truth is they could say we’re twins. In fact, the first mention of Blogmemes on Ñblog was on January 8, a month after we launched.

Comparing the engines

It has to be said that meneame started with its own code, and we used DiggClone, which we left behind, but which unfortunately caused a string of problems because we decided (wrongly, in retrospect) to keep its data model. That has meant a series of patches and some pretty ugly things to keep performance reasonable. In that sense, meneame is a better engine than akarrú, since it performs better thanks to better data modeling.

However, I think that from the graphic design point of view, the use of Smarty gives akarrú more flexibility, since changing the templates is easy, and it will be even easier once we improve the configuration mechanism. This lets you separate presentation from code, something I don’t see being as easy with meneame. In fact, when I set up the Portuguese version of blogmemes the installation was simple, and the translation was done by Jorge de Sá Peliteiro, a user who knows nothing about computing, and who only changed the text in the conf files and in a few templates (some translations are still missing, but that’s been for reasons beyond my control).

Blogmemes and the blogosphere

There have been interesting mentions of blogmemes in the blogosphere, and I’ve read a lot about the phenomenon of the digg clones.

But the one who has become an expert on the subject is bonhamled, who from his blog Recuerdos del día de mañana has followed the phenomenon and contributed interesting findings.

Divergence

But blogmemes, which started out emulating digg, will begin to evolve in a quite different direction.
We’ll stand on the shoulders of giants to start doing interesting things, and one of the first results is the concept of Circulation. Thanks to FeedBurner we can explore what happens to the stories published on blogmemes. How they circulate through the blogosphere, and how that translates into visits to the sites of blogmemes' correspondents.

Blogmemes will become a tool for exploring the blogosphere. The core of blogmemes will stay the same, but we’ll innovate in other directions thanks to the many APIs available for exploring the blogosphere.

Self-promotion, spam and other weeds

Philosophically I’m a lover of absolute freedom; to me it is the highest value guiding all of human ethics. On blogmemes we’ll trust the wisdom of the community, even if it costs us dearly.

On blogmemes there’s no restriction on publishing, and nobody votes against a story either. You’re not required to give a url to publish; a title and the text are enough. In that sense blogmemes is like one big community blog, with the difference that users vote for the entries they like.

Note that voting is positive, as in a democracy: you vote for your favorite, but you don’t vote against the entries you don’t like. You don’t report the posts that are garbage, or self-promotion, or whatever other label, either (informers annoy me). That isn’t necessary, and it’s a behavior that doesn’t exist in democracies. You only see it when supervised democracies, dictatorships or police states are set up, where citizens act as snitches.

Since I don’t like snitches, there’s no mechanism for reporting these supposed problems on blogmemes. Blogmemes has a democratic model. Today many criticize democracy, and hold up as examples the election of Evo Morales, or of Hamas. But that’s what democracy is about. Letting the people decide, even if we don’t like who gets elected.

I think that if someone wants to promote himself, let him. In fact I’ve set up a category for those who want to self-promote.

Newton teaches us that every action generates a reaction of equal intensity but in the opposite direction. If we put up barriers to self-promotion, the crowd will find a way to game the system.
Personally I agree with the criticism of being forced to vote on meneame, mostly because being forced to do anything is a drag.

On blogmemes there is no karma, but we have a mechanism that ranks users by influence and popularity. Influence has to do with how a person votes, and how they participate, with comments. Popularity has to do with how people vote on a post, that is, how it is judged by one’s peers.

But having high popularity or influence doesn’t give you more power over everyone else. It just makes you stand out, and I want to highlight those who make blogmemes an interesting site to read and visit.

With the addition of circulation, we’ll be able to fine-tune this ranking further, because we’ll factor in how each story is perceived outside the site itself.

I don’t think it’s necessary to add mechanisms to filter stories or people; the system should regulate itself. I think that by adding mechanisms like a story classifier, mandatory voting, and karma, you get the opposite effect. It would be interesting to know what would happen if meneame removed all the restrictions. Would it reach an equilibrium?

I think so. The system will find its equilibrium point.

Maybe I trust people too much. It must be because I’m stupid :wink: