Give me a ping, Vasili

Tue 28 Nov 2006 03:27 PM

Some cogno-intellectual blog monkey posts asking for people to link to him in the name of memetic science:

People write in general (typically truimphant) terms about how swiftly a single voice can travel from one side of the internet to the other and back again, but how often does that actually happen?

You can read the rest of it for yourself.

As I understand it, he wants to collect data on how many links he can score by begging for them and asking others to beg in his stead. If money were involved, it would be a Ponzi scheme. If he claimed that there would be mystic retribution for failing to link, it would be a chain letter. If he were google-bombing, it would be the Brian Leiter project. None of those antecedents obtain, so it is just an uncontrolled social science experiment that will produce some anecdotal numbers for a conference paper he is writing.

Even if it won't produce robust phenomena, linking to him costs nothing. As per instructions, I hereby encourage you to link.

I picked up the meme from Janet.