(Not My) Experiment

Scientific experiment in which we participate by placing this link here: How fast is a meme?

According to an update to the experiment linked above, apparently a meme is capable of spreading “very very fast.” Of course this doesn’t absolve one from first having to say something compelling enough to ‘take off.’

So I decided to include a sentence—a single, solitary sentence—debunking the idea that one lone voice can be heard in the wilderness, that in truth the blogosphere is highly hierarchical, and that the likelihood of that voice being heard depends on cultivating the wilderness in which bloggers scream.

Not that lungs don’t matter: the more powerful and engaging the writer, the more likely he or she will be to find and retain an audience. Finding that audience, as any blogger knows, is a difficult task. But given effective quality control, an audience could be enticed to follow strains of thought personally and disciplinarily foreign, i.e. outside idiosyncratic and professional interests. [Acephalous: The Speed of Meme? Very, Very Fast — Emphasis added.]

We (read: I) seem to be failing on (at least) one of these points. I’d prefer to think it’s in ‘cultivating an audience’ rather than in ‘writing engagingly’; but I am often given to grandiosity.

[Via: Philosoraptor]