Neomeme

Notice the abundance of alliterations in the titles so far? Yeah. Those alliterations sure feel good, like a massage from a sultry Swedish slut. Anyway:Since my foolhardy jump into blogging, I’ve been lurking in the blogosphere looking for ideas to appropriate inspiration. I thought I might take a look at the first posts of some popular/celebrity bloggers, just to see how they started out. Some were predictable, but some very surprising. Read on:
From the top ten, as ranked by the foremost authority on success in the blogosphere, Technorati:Unsurprisingly, the tech blogs, regning #1 champion Engadget jump right into tech coverage. Engadget makes a historic post about the inception of T-flash, the precursor to modern MicroSD cards. The comments, posted almost two years and over 1,000 pages of posts later are “from the future” and pretty damn funny. Rival blog and #3 Gizmodo began with the meaningful “Test-ignore me” followed by an indecipherable string of characters. Aeons from now, as the people of the future unearth the remains of the Technorati civilization and study the prophet Gizmodo, their historians will struggle with this transmission in a vain effort to unlock its true meaning. The first human-readable post is about nothing less than The Ultimate Supergadget. The review it links to makes such awesome statements as “In the future, everyone will carry a pocket computer that will tell them where they are, what they are looking at and what it might mean.” Sadly, the supergadget is nothing more than a now-deprecated Archos Jukebox. But what an attention-grabbing headline! And #2 BoingBoing starts off with a simple pimping of another tech review site. In a truly ironic “That’s not ironic, that’s just a coincidence” moment #5 Techcrunch profiles then-new blog rating site Technorati.

Moving from the tech side of things, #6 Huffington Post begins with a bevy of posts from celebrity bloggers and commentators among a firestorm of publicity. No need for introductions there. Daily Kos, the other juggernaut of political blogs, jumps right into political coverage.

Suprisingly popular and extremely creative #9 PostSecret begins with an invitation for people to mail in their secrets. No real introduction or exaplanation of the reason behind the site, though.

Of the top ten, only #8 Lifehacker bothered to write a meaningful welcome describing the mission of the site.

The other two,Ars Technica and “Random Chinese Blog” don’t count, because one is more than just a blog and the other is more than in English. Whew.

So what’s the point of this utterly pointless look back at beginnings? There is no point. You can write an introduction, you can launch an elaborate ad campaign, or you can just jump in and start posting content. Your beginnings have almost no effect on future success or failiure. Of course, being sponsored by a major blog network doesn’t hurt any, and getting a head start is always helpful, but not crucial.