Friday, June 25, 2004
The Most Powerful Forces in Practical Memetics
In the most recent issue of The Journal of Memetics, it was persuasively argued that the meme that is memetics itself, faces strong selection pressures from more useful, zeitgeisty academic disciplines, and is itself likely to become extinct.
While it is true that academic memetics is as dull as ditchwater, practical memetics is thriving. On a daily basis bloggers are fighting to maintain their place just ahead of the meme-curve. If you want your links to be "cool", they don't just have to be interesting, but you have to post them before the massive meme-popularisers get to them. Jason Kottke has been described as an informational Typhoid Mary, but he's not the only vastly infective meme spreader. There are several tools available for seeing which memes are spreading fastest, and who is doing the spreading. Having surveyed the blogdex, the technorati top 100, the daypop top 40 links/weblogs, and the most popular blo.gs, I conclude that there are essentially three categories of meme: nerd (which includes all science, programming, and web design), politics, and most importantly entertainment (which includes all games, amusements and web frippery). Although a really powerful meme will infect almost all the big hitters, some sites by nature of their theme are immune to one or more categories of meme. instapundit will never feature a story about japanese sex toys, just as fark will never debate the latest developments in Movable Type. In ranking my top ten, I have considered web traffic (where assessable), frequency of new outbound links, number of inbound links, both static and fresh, and finally an eyeball judgement of what percentage of big memes will be picked up by a site.
1.boingboing
2.metafilter
3.slashdot
4.fark
5.instapundit
6.Kottke
7.Andrew Sullivan
8.Anil Dash
9.plastic
10.memepool
Impressively five of the ten are one-man shows, but each, because of their A-list status, receive hundreds of meme submissions daily, which enables them to stay on top of the pile. That list basically constitutes the blogs and sites I strive to beat to a meme. It gives me great pride that I was 72 hours ahead of boingboing and memepool with the Hatebeak meme, and literally months ahead of Kottke on the "25 weirdest Amazon items" meme. On the other hand the Power Of The 10™ is so great that there's no shame in linking to a meme that they already infected you with.
Long after That's How It Happened is dead and gone, those ten will probably still be serving fresh slices of piping hot meme, and I recommend them all as excellent sources of quality contagion.
In the most recent issue of The Journal of Memetics, it was persuasively argued that the meme that is memetics itself, faces strong selection pressures from more useful, zeitgeisty academic disciplines, and is itself likely to become extinct.
While it is true that academic memetics is as dull as ditchwater, practical memetics is thriving. On a daily basis bloggers are fighting to maintain their place just ahead of the meme-curve. If you want your links to be "cool", they don't just have to be interesting, but you have to post them before the massive meme-popularisers get to them. Jason Kottke has been described as an informational Typhoid Mary, but he's not the only vastly infective meme spreader. There are several tools available for seeing which memes are spreading fastest, and who is doing the spreading. Having surveyed the blogdex, the technorati top 100, the daypop top 40 links/weblogs, and the most popular blo.gs, I conclude that there are essentially three categories of meme: nerd (which includes all science, programming, and web design), politics, and most importantly entertainment (which includes all games, amusements and web frippery). Although a really powerful meme will infect almost all the big hitters, some sites by nature of their theme are immune to one or more categories of meme. instapundit will never feature a story about japanese sex toys, just as fark will never debate the latest developments in Movable Type. In ranking my top ten, I have considered web traffic (where assessable), frequency of new outbound links, number of inbound links, both static and fresh, and finally an eyeball judgement of what percentage of big memes will be picked up by a site.
1.boingboing
2.metafilter
3.slashdot
4.fark
5.instapundit
6.Kottke
7.Andrew Sullivan
8.Anil Dash
9.plastic
10.memepool
Impressively five of the ten are one-man shows, but each, because of their A-list status, receive hundreds of meme submissions daily, which enables them to stay on top of the pile. That list basically constitutes the blogs and sites I strive to beat to a meme. It gives me great pride that I was 72 hours ahead of boingboing and memepool with the Hatebeak meme, and literally months ahead of Kottke on the "25 weirdest Amazon items" meme. On the other hand the Power Of The 10™ is so great that there's no shame in linking to a meme that they already infected you with.
Long after That's How It Happened is dead and gone, those ten will probably still be serving fresh slices of piping hot meme, and I recommend them all as excellent sources of quality contagion.
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