Memetrackers & C.: A Physics of Ideas

Today, talking about issues on a project I’m going to work on, I remembered of a paper I read last year by Nova Spivack: A Physics of Ideas. It makes a parallel between the physical space and the information space.

The center of it was the idea tha we could measure the relevance of some idea by measuring its momentum defined as its velocity (i.e. the rate of occurrances per unit time in a given time interval) X its mass (i.e. how “large” the meme is).
This just makes sense to me as a way to prioritze and maybe filter the memes which get transported by the web (specially by RSS feeds): a meme or documents with high momentum are

representative of whatever ideas happen to be most important now [*],

by looking changes in momentum we can identify the trends which are currently gaining importance,

this enables us to determine whether memes are “heating up” or “cooling off” — a meme is heating up if it is important and timely and has positive impulse [*].

This approach is effective exactly because it takes into account the dynamic nature of the information flow which is much more evident today on the blogsphere.

As a side note, the original article is from july 2004 well before the rise of the memetrackers which we now enjoy, and I always wondered if some kind of momentum-calculating algorithm was used inside of them (or if it was not why).

P.S. I just saw that Nova Spivack has another interesting article on “Collective Intelligence”
[*] citations from the article