Neomeme

Since it is, after all, politics season, in the interest of fair coverage, I turn now to the other darling of the Internet long shot presidential candidate, Republican-but-really-a-libertarian Ron Paul. Despite polling under 2% in traditional polls, Ron Paul has won every major Internet poll. His supporters have dominated the Internet- they may not be the most numerous, but they sure scream the loudest. Ron Paul has a monstrous amount of blog mentions, dwarfing even Barack Obama on some days, and dominates all other “Web 2.0″ social media sites. And did I mention that he has the most YouTube subscribers in what may be becoming a surprisingly YouTube-centric election. Read more »

If you haven’t heard of long shot Democratic presidential candidate Mike Gravel, you will soon. Immediately following his participation in the first Democratic debate, Gravel’s popularity shot up tremendously, thanks in large part to exposure online. If debate performance can be measured by the number of supporters won over post-debate, then Mike Gravel won the debate hands down. As I write this, the number one story on reddit is “Meet the Next President of the United States of America”, which links to a video compilation of Gravel’s best(and most provocative) statements in the debate. The same story is #1 on Digg, climbing to the top in record time. You only need to look as far as the thousands of votes Gravel received on reddit and Digg to see that he is popular, at least online.

The interesting thing is that Mike Gravel was dismissed by the mainstream media as a nobody with no support, and denied participation in the next debate. Ironically, it is this very rejection by the mainstream media as not popular enough/too controversial/too outspoken that has made Gravel so popular online. Read more »

In what is clearly an attempt to teach schoolchildren the true meaning of irony, a C|Net blog announces that the blog bubble has burst. They base this on Technorati’s highly respected State of the Blogosphere report which noticed that although the overall number of blogs is increasing, the number of active blogs has reached a plateau of around 15 millions. The facts are true- lots of blogs are falling silent every second, enough to balance out the growth in blogging. Tris Hussey thinks growth will pick up again once blogging gets a second wind, but I’m not so sure. Read more »

Wordpress.com had, in my opinion, one of the most clever(and also most painful) April fools pranks when they made everybody blog of the minute. Unfortunately, since then they’ve gone back to the same old “algorithm”, which simply ranks the 100 blogs getting the most traffic for that day and picks one out from the top. Of course, there are some excellent blogs that also get decent traffic and thus become “blog of the minute”, like the current champion, Strange Maps. I would have never discovered that excellent and unique blog had it not been for Wordpress.com’s featured blogs. But I am also certain that there are dozens more blogs just as good that I have never discovered because they are not blessed with the traffic they rightly deserve. Traffic rarely, if ever, equals quality. For every popular genius out there blogging, there must be 100 even more brilliant bloggers out there toiling away in anonymity (I am not one of them). Somehow, the Wordpress ecosystem, and the blogosphere as a whole has become incredibly skewed. In blogging, there is a very small middle class in terms of traffic, which I am fortunate to be a part of. Most are either very visible or, much more likely, very invisible, and some of those certainly don’t deserve that invisibility. I’ve got the math to prove it. Read more »

Here’s a riddle for you: What’s invisible to those inside it but painfully obvious to outsiders?

Answer: The A-List of bloggers.

Recently, there’s been a lot of criticism coming from the likes of Robert Scoble, Jason Calacanis, Steve Rubel and Loren Feldman of the concept of an “A-list” of top celebrity bloggers. They all agree that either there is no A-list, or the A-list is not important, and that A-listers are not special and that anyone can join at any time, if only the rest of us weren’t so damn lazy. They’re all wrong. Read more »

No, this isn’t becoming a personal blog. But I am playing along with Engtech’s blogging contest. Not so much for the potential lure of random selection for WordPress credits, but more to explore the general issue of “Why People Blog”, which will probably surface in a future post(my bet’s on the next one). I assume that “Why People Blog” has been beaten to death by bloggers everywhere, but I will stubbornly refuse to acknowledge that fact by not reading any of them. Anyhow, why I blog:

I blog to capture the moments between wakefulness and sleep. I have always had ideas lying in bed, trying to fall asleep, because, in the twilight moments of the mind, what can you do but think? I would bolt out of bed, grab a pen and scribble furiously on tiny post-its, because that’s all I have readily available at my desk. At first, the ideas were random, stories, poems, DaVincian contraptions and bizarre insects, journeys in brain crevices. But, for the past couple years, undoubtedly influenced by my reading(I devour tech blogs voraciously), my half-asleep ideas became more focused, more polished. Now, they are plans for startups, tech ideas, analysis of social networks, tech memes and the blogosphere, hacks and gadgets, etc. The tech I read about every day has infused my sleepy moments to such a degree that they have become inseparable. Before writing any post(yes, including this one), I ask myself: Is this something I would want to read? Would I be interested in reading this if I stumbled across it as I do on hundreds of blog posts daily? A lot of the time, the answer is no. And so, every night, in my final hours of wakefulness, thoughts race like bullet trains through my head and linger in my dreams. A few of these thoughts make it onto these pages, because, if they are not fleshed out and developed somewhere, they will dissapear forever. As for the rest of them- every night, as my mind resists sleep, a few more crumpled Post-Its join the bizarre anthill of discarded ideas that so relentlessly draws my daily final thoughts.

For the record, I spent about 10 minutes writing that last sentence and I still hate it.

Okay maybe this blog is getting a little meta. Blogging about blogging ,which engtech rightly compares to masturbation. After all, this blog is largely about the Internet and the new ways in which units of information spread. New units of information, traveling in novel ways. Neomemes, if you will.

The latest little viral meme sweeping the blogosphere is the “Which Superhero are You?” quiz. Michael Arrington is Green Lantern, Jason Calacanis is Green Lantern, I’m Green Lantern, and even randomly sampled bloggers are all Green Lantern. Even those who are other superheroes are still between 70 and 80 percent Green Lantern, the same percentage Green Lanterns got!

Is the quiz rigged as some sort of twisted viral marketing gimmick for an upcoming Green Lantern movie? Or do bloggers and technologists truly share Green Lantern’s propensity towards hotheadedness and magic rings?

Looking at the source code for the Javascript quiz, it’s easy to see which questions make someone a Green Lantern. Each question has five possible answers, ranging from “No” to “Yes”. Each mark closer to “Yes” adds 5% to your score, so a “No” adds 0% to your score for that superhero while a “Yes” gives you 20%, in-between answers giving you a multiple of 5%. The questions that affect your Green Lantern score are as follows:

• Will you sometimes go too far to get your way?

• Are you interested in space travel?

• Do you have strong willpower?

• Do you have one object that you highly value?

Notice that there are four questions for Green Lantern. Since the most you can score on any one question, the highest Green Lantern score you can get is 80%! Many other superheroes have 5 questions, allowing scores of up to 100%. This explains why everyone’s Green Lantern score is 80% or less, and also reinforces the fact that everyone is Green Lantern, even those who got higher percentages for other superheroes, because their scores were 70% or higher. A 75% Green Lantern score is only 5% away from the highest score possible, making it equivalent to a 95% score for many other superheroes. Now for a closer look at the questions, and why so many bloggers answered Yes to most if not all of them:

• Will you sometimes go too far to get your way?

The key word there is sometimes. Research has shown that people taking surveys are a lot more likely to answer yes to a “sometimes” question.

• Are you interested in space travel?

Well, duh. We’re bloggers, we must have some degree of geekiness within us. Of course we’re going to be interested in Scifi and spaceships.

• Do you have strong willpower?

The weak-willed don’t have the willpower to make themselves admit it, even on an anonymous Internet quiz. This is a terrible quiz/survey question, but a great Green Lantern question, because he can only use his ring to materialize objects if he has the willpower to control them.

• Do you have one object that you highly value?

For this audience, this question is a no-brainer. Who isn’t in love with their Macbook or cell phone?

So is the Green Lantern going to replace Spider-Man as the geek superhero of choice? Probably not. This quiz suffers from poor coding and question design that weigh it unfairly in the Green Lantern’s favor. Sorry, bloggers. You can take off the power rings you found in your cereal now- the only thing you have in common with the Green Lantern is an overactive imagination.

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:
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