MemeTracker
Memetracker Module Released for Drupal
One of the most powerful and innovative modules to be developed for Drupal this year is Memetracker. Written by Kyle Mathews in the Google Summer of Code 2008, Memetracker intelligently filters content on a website to synthesize the most popular and important topics and conversations into memes. Similar to the way Google News and TechMeme operate, Memetracker can work with RSS and Atom feeds to track issues, current events, and internet “buzz” across numerous channels simultaneously. The module is a “smart aggregator” that can analyze the actual text of RSS feeds and group posts with related content into categories that can be displayed on a website. The Memetracker module uses click tracking to rank the popularity of sources over time and sorts the display automatically based on these results. There is a public demo for Memetracker available online.
Kyle Mathews’ blog contains some great insights on developing social communities with Drupal, and working with Web 2.0 technologies. For example, he writes:
In researching ways that online communities help participants find the most interesting content/conversations, I’ve found three patterns which help.
1. First is the small-world pattern. Via Organic Groups, you split conversations by topic. Members congregate around only the groups they are interested in.
2. Second is the Twitter pattern. Using buddylist or user relationships, members follow friends or people who’s ideas they find interesting.
3. The third pattern is for members to read the most interesting memes as they are somehow determined by the community (this is where my module will help out)…My proposal then is to write a memetracker module that will fulfill the same role as Techmeme does to the tech community for any community for which it is installed. My module will intelligently filter and group community generated content to display to the community in real time the most interesting conversations and memes as they emerge.
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