“Meme” Dynamics

Professor Office Sex is trying to study the real-time dynamcis of the blogosphere, by manufacturing a “meme” that he’ll then track:

While you do that, a script I’ve written will track this meme (via Technorati) across the internet in 10 minute intervals. It will record the number of links to this post, register their authority and create a database the very size of which will cause my poor processor to fall tumbling, in flames, down a steep cliff. (So be it. We all must makes sacrifices in the name of science.)

Of course, like any good graduate student, he’s also afflicted with angst:

My fear is that I’ll post this and no one will participate in my experiment. On the one hand, that’ll be educational too, allowing me to talk about top-down vs. bottom-up dynamics, the ineffectiveness of compulsion and coercion on free-range bloggers, &c. On the other, I would rather not tell the august body of the Modern Language Association that bloggers only stop posting about what they had for lunch (fish sticks!) when their cat strikes another (fifth today!) outrageously adorable pose…

So consider helping a blogger out by throwing Scott a link.

(Of course, if he really wanted good results, he should’ve made up a silly three-question quiz (“What sort of cheese are you?”), and posted that… I think this is just a play for meta-fame, as some variant of “Most shameless link bleg in history”…)