Timothy Young, founder of Socialcast has written a thoughtful essay in which he compares information consumption habits to food consumption habits.

The popular and rowdy message board 4Chan (very NSFW) has struck again. Best known as a fertile breeding ground for internet memes, a collective based around the site has hacked Time Magazine’s annual “World’s Most Influential Person” poll to place 4Chan founder moot at the top of the list. Time claims no significant  foul play was involved, but looking at the results makes it very clear that something is amiss. Music Machinery does a good job of explaining the technical details behind this hack, which involved auto-voting programs and breaking a captcha system.
Music Machinery: “moot wins, Time Inc. loses”

Social Collider is an interesting data visualization tool that reveals connections between conversations on Twitter. Sascha Pohflepp and Karsten Schmidt created the software, which can make the cultural spread of ideas visible.
Information Aesthetics explains how it works:
One can search for usernames or topics, which are tracked through time and visualized much like the way a particle collider draws pictures of subatomic matter. Posts that did not resonate with anyone just connect to the next item in the stream. The ones that did, however, spin off and horizontally link to users or topics who relate to them, either directly or in [...]

The Internet Famous Class at Parsons New School is all about studying the art and science of getting hits.  Recently featured on Current TV, the course is dedicated to teaching students the most effective ways of leveraging social media to gain the largest possible audience online.
In order to test their theories and experiment with new strategies for gaining popularity, students are expected to develop their own projects, either collectively or on their own, utilizing any and all media in conjunction with the internet.
What makes the course particularly interesting is that students’ grades are based entirely on how much traffic they [...]

Are ideas literally contagious? It sure seems like it when watching the wildfire spread of memes on the internet. A recent Slate piece shows that the act of “going viral” may be structurally more like its biological counterpart than previously thought. Studying the hyped-up “25 things” meme from Facebook revealed that the spread of the idea was strikingly similar to a virus outbreak,  including mutation and  epidemic progression.
Slate explains:
Since I’m no evolutionary expert, I shipped Slate’s data to Lauren Ancel Meyers, a biology professor at the University of Texas who models the spread of infectious diseases mathematically. Meyers says that [...]