Congratulations OneUtah authors! You all ROCK!
We have been nominated for the Thinking Bloggers Award.
Here’s what Dr. Passman said about us:
One Utah: This is an eclectic blog with multiple authors, all of whom live in Utah. The writing is often surprising, always thoughtful and amazingly fresh.
I’ve haven’t had time to look more closely, but apparently, there are other things we need to do according to his site.
Congratulations, you won a Thinking Blogger Award:
Should you choose to participate, please make sure you pass this list of rules to the blogs you are tagging. The participation rules are simple:
1. If, and only if, you get tagged, write a post with links to 5 blogs that make you think.
2. Link to this post so that people can easily find the exact origin of the meme
3. Optional: Proudly display the ‘Thinking Blogger Award’ with a link to the post that you wrote.
Perhaps you guys can look into it and figure out what it’s all about.
#1 by schreinervideo on May 11, 2007 - 12:44 pm
Congrats, Cliff! You deserve all the credit. But- yet more rules? Sorry I haven’t been contributing much lately. Been traveling a lot and trying to finish this Tibet documentary. I will be blogging from Iceland while shooting later this month if you’re interested. No kidding. I’ll try to get you an autograph from Bjork.
#2 by Deseret Spectacle on May 11, 2007 - 1:55 pm
Let’s try it one more time without the “quicktags”
From some cursory research, it looks like a novel experiment in “meme” tracking. These have been done before in other ways. One of the earliest “meme propagation tracking” experiments can be found at http://acephalous.typepad.com/acephalous/2006/11/measuring_the_s.html.
In case you’re not familiar with the concept of a “meme”:
As defined by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene (1976): “a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation.” “Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation. …
http://www.silcom.com/~barnowl/chain-letter/glossary.htm
Google provides more definitions.
In this case, it looks like an interesting method of tracking social networks. (It also spreads exponentially.) Each “Award Winner” must then nominate 5 other “Award Winners” which link back to the original post. In that way you generate a huge tree. I’m not sure how many nodes down the tree OneUtah is, but probably more than a couple.
It kind of makes me want to do some meme-tree sabotaging, just ’cause I’m that kind of guy. Basically link to several of these pages with the “Thinking Blogger Award” Graphic from the Deseret Spectacle, just to create a feedback loop in the tracking mechanism. But that wouldn’t be nice. Would it? It would be interesting.. Oh my, I’m so conflicted.
Anyway, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it’s not an “award” in the traditional sense. It may perhaps be a little disingenuous, but not extraordinarily so.
DS
#3 by Deseret Spectacle on May 11, 2007 - 1:56 pm
Okay, well, if since I can’t seem to post the comment here, even though my question above posted, you can check out what I found out about this at the Deseret Spectacle.
DS
#4 by Cliff Lyon on May 11, 2007 - 3:08 pm
Jeremey (Deseret Spec),
Askimet trapped it. I hate Askimet.
What is real about the “award”, is someone of real merit and accomplishment NOT from Utah, picked our blog from among millions and said some nice things.
That’s nice. OneUtah is cool because it is freedom of speech in the purest sense in a ” public square”.
I have never cared much for the “one person blog”.
I suppose you could nominate your own 5 blogs. There doesn’t seem to be any sponsor. Indeed a cyber meme.
#5 by schreinervideo on May 11, 2007 - 3:19 pm
Deseret: I read your comment with great interest, both in its observation of the motivations behind the “award” and your desires to sabotage it. There have been lots of writings about memes and their deployment in Adbusters and other periodicals implying some memes are planted with the goal of infecting colonies of like-minded or vulnerable groups i.e. social networks, religious organizations with “common knowledge” i.e. global warming (which isn’t a bad idea anyway). While it sounds sinister, it’s probably the only reason a lot of us write blogs or read this junk anyway: to either change somebody’s mind or change our own. The trick is to be able to spot a decoy, replicant or evil memebot when it invades the gene pool. Sounds like a Philip K. Dick novel.
#6 by Deseret Spectacle on May 11, 2007 - 3:21 pm
Cliff,
My name isn’t Jeremey, my name is James, and so sorry to have dug into it more for you.
Indeed that is what was “real” about it, but indeed there was “more to it.” From your tone, and your “not much caring for the one person blog” comment, (gee, I run a one-person blog – oh, you know that), I get the impression that I somehow offended by providing some research into the “Thinking Blogger Award” Meme Propagation Tracking. And the irony is that I’ve been a fan of OneUtah and was genuinely trying come to the call of “Perhaps you guys can look into it and figure out what it’s all about.”
Congratulations on your Thinking Blogger Award, and best of luck to you, Cliff.
DS
#7 by Deseret Spectacle on May 11, 2007 - 3:29 pm
schreinervideo:
I don’t think there was anything nefarious to the Thinking Blogger Memel; it was simply interesting to me, both in its execution and the types of data that could be derived from it. As Cliff said, in his inimitable, empathetic response – someone recognized OneUtah and wrote quite eloquently about its merits. I did not mean to detract from that.
My interest in sabotaging it, which was more of a musing, stemmed from observations of other, less innocuous social network analysis. Including the NSA’s acquisition of call records and other programs, active and under research.
Best,
DS
#8 by Cliff Lyon on May 11, 2007 - 3:53 pm
James,
Hi James,
I’m sorry, I was moving so fast. I thought you were Jeremy from some other site that has attacked mer personally and mercilessly.
Now I know who you are. I do love your blog. Very incisive.
I wish I had more time to read other blogs these days.
I nominate Deseret Spectacle
#9 by Caveat on May 11, 2007 - 5:33 pm
Hey, I recognize myself in that meme-mirror. It’s not exactly plagerism is it. I’m begging your forgiveness if it costs you an award. There is no way I could have foreseen such an eventuality! No way.
Now, can we get back to impeaching our criminal overlords?
#10 by Deseret Spectacle on May 11, 2007 - 7:42 pm
Cliff, et al,
Sounds like a case of simple misunderstanding. I may have concentrated so much on the technical aspects of the meme propagation (which fascinates me in and of itself) that I lost sight of the context of the original post. In any event, no harm, no foul; back to fighting the good fight.
DS
The Deseret Spectacle
#11 by Caveat on May 11, 2007 - 10:54 pm
DesSpec. I too find the flow of ideas to be of great interest. Much as the ‘Follow the Money’ notion leads one to surprising insights.
Though I try to cover as many memes as is humanly possible in each and every comment, I remain protective of my sources. It would be unfair to lead anyone tracing memes on a wild goose-chase by suggesting that the source of the ‘Good’ meme was anywhere near the White House, so I’ll resist.
In much the same way that the ’seven removes to Kevan Bacon game’ is played, it would propably surprize everyone if all the corruption embodied in this regime (seen as a cluster of equally corrupt memes) might not be traced back to a very small number of players who’e proven themselves in the world of the ‘Big Lie’.