Friday, December 01, 2006

Perchance to Meme

I'm late on this, because I had taken my bimonthly sabbatical from blogging. I hope it doesn't screw up Scott's results, since I was aware of the experiment about two days ago, but wasn't ready to dust off Blogger yet. The idea is to trace the spread of a meme through the blogosphere. Scott thinks that
...they acquire minor prominence among low-traffic blogs before being picked up by a high-traffic one, from which many more low-traffic blogs snatch them. Contra blog-triumphal models of memetic bootstrapping, I believe most memes are—to borrow a term from Daniel Dennett's rebuttal of punctuated equilibrium—"skyhooked" into prominence by high-traffic blogs.

As I heard about the meme from Chad Orzel (I think), who has a relatively high-traffic site, I would be in the latter stage of low-traffic blogs snatching at his proffered meme.

Please help the experiment along by following the directions:

  1. Write a post linking to this one in which you explain the experiment. (All blogs count, be they TypePad, Blogger, MySpace, Facebook, &c.)
  2. Ask your readers to do the same. Beg them. Relate sob stories about poor graduate students in desperate circumstances. Imply I'm one of them. (Do whatever you have to. If that fails, try whatever it takes.)
  3. Ping Technorati.

Who knows, you may help to crash a campus server.

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