[meme.garden]

"Mary Flanagan is a leading innovator, artist, educator and designer, whose works have included everything from game-inspired art, to commercial games that shift people's thinking about biases and stereotypes. Daniel C. Howe is an artist, researcher and critical technologist whose work focuses on the social and political implications of networked and computational technologies, specifically concerning privacy, surveillance, and human rights. Christopher Egert is an Associate Professor in the School of Interactive Games and Media at the Rochester Institute of Technology.

[meme.garden] is an Internet service that blends software art and search tool to visualize participants' interests in prevalent streams of information, encouraging browsing and interaction between users in real time, through time.

Utilizing the WordNet lexical reference system from Princeton University, [meme.garden] introduces concepts of temporality, space, and empathy into a network-oriented search tool. Participants search for words which expand contextually through the use of a lexical database. English nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs are organized into floating synonym 'seeds,' each representing one underlying lexical concept.

When participants 'plant' their interests, each becomes a tree that 'grows' over time. Each organism's leaves are linked to related streaming RSS feeds, and by interacting with their own and other participants' trees, participants create a contextual timescape in which interests can be seen growing and changing within an environment that endures." -- from Turbulence