Here’s an interesting idea. Scott Eric Kaufman is trying to measure how quickly memes spread through the Internet. He’s looking to see whether memes can spread quickly simply because of the volume of blogs out there, or whether they only do so if they are mentioned by a high profile blog. Kaufman favors the latter explanation, as do I. But you don’t know until you run the experiment.
You can help here. Spread the meme. Write your own blog post linking to Kaufman’s original post.
The potential flaw here is that Kaufman can only measure blogs that are registered on Technorati, and vast numbers of blogs (particularly LiveJournals) are not. But hey, no science is perfect, and this is at least an interesting start.
Oh, and just to prove that high profile blogs work, I got news of this from Crooked Timber.
Technorati spiders blogs on large services (LJ in particular) regardless of whether they’re registered or not. My journal was searchable on Technorati long before I registered it.
There are a *lot* of flaws in this. There’s no control, no attempt to spread the same/similar meme via different methods, the “meme” itself is null content and so doesn’t factor the “interestingness” of the concept, etc. Given that he’s hoping to get a conference paper out of it, I decline to participate in bad science.
Tom dear, the MLA is about as likely to be able to tell good science from bad as tell a tachyon from a pteranodon. Their standard reaction to all four will be “wha???” (unless of course they get interested in the etymology of the words).