{{Refimprove, date=June 2007
A memetracker is a tool for studying the migration of
memes
A meme (; ) is an idea, behavior, or style that spreads by means of imitation from person to person within a culture and often carries symbolic meaning representing a particular phenomenon or theme. A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ...
across a group of people. The term is typically used to describe
website
A website (also written as a web site) is any web page whose content is identified by a common domain name and is published on at least one web server. Websites are typically dedicated to a particular topic or purpose, such as news, educatio ...
s that either:
#analyze
blog
A blog (a Clipping (morphology), truncation of "weblog") is an informational website consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries also known as posts. Posts are typically displayed in Reverse chronology, reverse chronologic ...
posts to determine what web pages are being discussed or cited most often on the
World Wide Web
The World Wide Web (WWW or simply the Web) is an information system that enables Content (media), content sharing over the Internet through user-friendly ways meant to appeal to users beyond Information technology, IT specialists and hobbyis ...
, or
#allow users to vote for links to web pages that they find of interest.
Sites in the latter group are often referred to as
social media
Social media are interactive technologies that facilitate the Content creation, creation, information exchange, sharing and news aggregator, aggregation of Content (media), content (such as ideas, interests, and other forms of expression) amongs ...
sites.
Sample systems
The original publicly viewable memetracker was Blogdex, which is now defunct. However, many sites inspired by it exist today, such as:
* Digg.com (a popular social media site)
*
Slashdot
''Slashdot'' (sometimes abbreviated as ''/.'') is a social news website that originally billed itself as "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters". It features news stories on science, technology, and politics that are submitted and evaluated by site ...
*
Reddit
Reddit ( ) is an American Proprietary software, proprietary social news news aggregator, aggregation and Internet forum, forum Social media, social media platform. Registered users (commonly referred to as "redditors") submit content to the ...
*
Technorati
Technorati is a search engine and a publisher advertising platform. Technorati launched its ad network in 2008.
In 2016, Synacor acquired Technorati for $3 million.
The company's core product was previously an Internet search engine for search ...
* Techmeme
* Polymeme
* Wikio
Memetrackers are frequently characterized by purely automatic operation in determining the most popular links, though many modern sites incorporate some level of human editorial control in an effort to combat
spam
Spam most often refers to:
* Spam (food), a consumer brand product of canned processed pork of the Hormel Foods Corporation
* Spamming, unsolicited or undesired electronic messages
** Email spam, unsolicited, undesired, or illegal email messages
...
links and other efforts to exploit the services commercially.
The introduction of memetrackers was instrumental in the rise of blogs as a serious competitor to traditional printed
news media
The news media or news industry are forms of mass media that focus on delivering news to the general public. These include News agency, news agencies, newspapers, news magazines, News broadcasting, news channels etc.
History
Some of the fir ...
. Through automating (or reducing to one click) the effort to spread ideas through
word of mouth
Word of mouth is the passing of information from person to person using oral communication, which could be as simple as telling someone the time of day. Storytelling is a common form of word-of-mouth communication where one person tells others a ...
, it became possible for casual blog readers to focus on the best of the
blogosphere
The blogosphere is made up of all blogs and their interconnections. The term implies that blogs exist together as a connected community (or as a collection of connected communities) or as a social networking service in which everyday authors can pu ...
rather than having to scan numerous individual blogs. The steady and frequent appearance of citations of or votes for the work of certain popular bloggers also helped create the so-called "A List" of bloggers.
See also
*
Web 2.0
Web 2.0 (also known as participative (or participatory) web and social web) refers to websites that emphasize user-generated content, ease of use, participatory culture, and interoperability (i.e., compatibility with other products, systems, a ...
*
Viral marketing
Viral marketing is a business strategy that uses existing social networks to promote a product mainly on various social media platforms. Its name refers to how consumers spread information about a product with other people, much in the same way th ...
Drupal
Drupal () is a free and open-source web content management system (CMS) written in PHP and distributed under the GNU General Public License. Drupal provides an open-source back-end framework for at least 14% of the top 10,000 websites worldwide ...