Neomeme

Note: This post is more extensive than your average blog meme post because I’m not like normal people and I like to deconstruct things and figure out how they work. I have a healthy dose of the hacker spirit, going all the way to when I was 5 and I took apart my father’s very expensive new camera.

KuiperCliff has popped my blog meme cherry by linking to me with the Tech Link Train, a blog meme that asks you to link to five science or technology blogs. This has been zipping around the blogosphere extremely quickly, undoubtedly because it
has all of the elements of a succesful meme- it has a simple yet somewhat specific premise, it is set up for growth via the pyramid effect(each blog links to five blogs, ideally each one of those blogs links to five blogs and so on), and it provides a clear benefit to the linkers by requiring that all of the “stops” of the train carry the full list of blogs participating in the meme. All of this obviously has tons of principles from the science of memetics, which I of course am a huge fan of(hence the title of this blog). So, just for fun, I decided to follow the meme, tracing it to its source.

The chronology of this particular meme train, going backwards. Each entry was linked to by the next entry in the list:

1. Neomeme- “traversing the memes that define us”. Here, obviously.

2. KuiperCliff - “getting to grips with technology and culture”. By Tim Stevens, “currently eking out a living as an archaeologist in Egypt”.

3. Inkblot Earth - “Being the adventures of a young man whose principal interests are aesthetics, ultra-science and artificial intelligence”. By Hrafn, who “lives in Iceland and studies computer science, specializing in artificial intelligence”.

4. Computer Science Canada - By Tony Targonski, a student at the University of Waterloo(Canada) studying computer science.

5. Tek-works - “What I learn, Each day in Tek”. By Richard Curry, who “has been in the Tech business for 12 years, lived in Peoria, IL, Raleigh, NC and Atlanta, GA.”

6. ReviewSaurus - “The Techie Dino”. By Indian blogger Mayank Gupta.

7. Tech Live (post deleted)- “Tech News Now Live”. By Indian tech blogger Phalgun Shenoy.

And there the trail goes cold. Based on additional Google and Technorati searches I conducted it looks pretty certain that Phalgun originated this particular train.

Now we see the power of applied memetics. Look at the wide spread of blogs in that list. Of course, the definition of the meme demands that it be limited to science and technology blogs. Even within that narrow space, the spread of the meme is staggering. From India to Canada, Iceland to Egypt, and finally here to Madison, WI, USA, the meme travels incredible geographical and cultural distances with ease, its reach growing and expanding at every stop. We have grown perhaps too accustomed to the Internet for such quick international communication to elicit any sense of awe and wonder, but it would be well to note that, even with all of our technology, most of us remain locked into communication within a very small circle. When my less technically inclined friend sends an email, he is communicating with someone down the hall, not someone halfway around the world.

But, even more importantly, a simple meme such as this one transcends subcultural boundaries. That is, it(ideally, anyway) breaks through barriers in the blog subculture. We all have a fixed set of blogs that we read more or less regularly, and unless one of those blogs links to another interesting blog, we may never discover it. Someone can revolve in the mommyblogger subculture or the music blog subculture or, in my case, the tech blog/Web 2.0 subculture. Cliques and groups will invariably form among bloggers, and it can sometimes be difficult to break out of that group and discover exciting new material. With every link to a blog I have not seen before, and yet frequented by someone whose work I enjoy reading, I expand my own horizons. This is akin to a very specific human-edited directory, only one based on content in communities I already enjoy.

Oh wait, was I supposed to extend the Link Train? I may have gotten a bit distracted. Very well, five technology blogs I like, from my feeds. This is almost too easy, because I almost exclusively read tech blogs:

1. //engtech

2. hyaline skies

3. trendsspotting

4. Many-to-Many

5. Social Synergy

I think you will love all of them. If I had a blogroll, all of these would occupy a prominent place on it.