I’m very interested (perhaps to a fault, some would say) in the power of popularity. Online, tools like Google use link-tracking to figure out the relative worth and importance of a piece of information. The assumption seems to be that if more people link to something, the “better” it must be.
Two sites even go so far as to track the spread of “memes” in blogs. Popdex and Blogdex (I’m a member of both) have lists that show what ideas are percolating in the internet on a given day. It’s a really neat little experiment in social engineering. Some items are obviously driven by current events and others are completely random.
Why am I discussing this issue today? I stumbled upon a news item that’s a big meme today: a Google-beating search technology named Vivisimo. I used this new search engine and searched for ‘Mostly Muppet’ and found entries on Popdex for memetic links from the past. This led me to a search on Blogdex and the rest is history.
So, in order to ratchet up my “relevance quotient”, a term I’m coining right here and now in a desperate bid to start my own meme, I’m going to link to two highly popular memes of the day. Enjoy.