memetracker

I ran across a new memetracker built on Drupal/OpenCalais and custom code. It looks very cool. Check it out at Polymeme.com

They're tracking some 25,000 blogs and apparently running them all through OpenCalias as part of the process for finding "memes" along with some human editorial touch.

The creator of polymeme writes more about the site on his blog:
http://evgenymorozov.com/blog/?p=397

I've pushed up an alpha release of memetracker to cvs and created a dev release. This is not production ready code. In fact the only thing impressive about the code is that it works at all and does something vaguely resembling what memetrackers are supposed to do.
Link to original proposal

How to install memetracker:

I just took this screenshot. Most everything is still broken but I've arrived to the point where the memetracker will detect memes and spit them out to the screen. Probably tomorrow morning I'll be pushing my first release up to CVS.

Scott Hatfield (mentor), Fabiano Sant'Ana (mentor), and Kyle Mathews (GSoC student) chatted on skype today discussing the memetracker module.

V1 of UML Drawing
V2 of UML Drawing - added color to Drupal specific code, added database access layer, added content_array parameter to memetracker->get_memes()

Round 1 of this proposal can be found here.

I'm putting up a rough draft of my proposal for review. This, I repeat is a rough draft, so there are some obvious flaws and missing pieces.

Summary:
I want to write two modules for Drupal as part of Google Summer of Code. One called meme_tracker and the other called machine_learning_api. The meme_tracker module will use the machine_learning_api to intelligently filter and group content from both internal and external content sources. The module's purpose is to find and display to a community in real time the most interesting conversations and memes within the community as they emerge.

Hello Drupliers. My name is Kyle Mathews. I'm a grad student in Information Systems at Brigham Young University working as a research assistant to several faculty members here. We are studying how and where social software can be used in education.

In the past eight months, I've built a number of classroom websites using Drupal. I've learned a considerable bit about Drupal in the process, became very involved in the community, and am writing a module (writing_assignment -- still a work in progress btw). I've loved most everything about Drupal but have found Drupal is missing an important component for building the perfect social learning website. This itches. So, in the best open-source fashion, I'm applying to Google Summer of Code to scratch my itch.