geometric explosion

geometric explosion

That Book Tag thing got me thinking. It is of course a chain letter. In the blogosphere, it is a particularly virulent form of chain letter, as it preys upon the vanity of bloggers (My God! Somebody actually cares what I read!). Plus, when the victims recipients of the chain letter post their replys, they generally link back to the culprit sender, thus boosting the referring links and hence the rankings in the Truth Laid Bear ecosystem.

There are on the order of ten million blogs in the blogosphere (a nice round number, maybe higher, maybe lower; by saying "on the order of" that generally means "within a factor of ten" ... call it between 3 million and 30 million). I have traced this back as far as Nancy Rommelman, but since she didn't link to the specific post that Jackie D tagged her with, I will have to do some digging to follow it back further. Nancy got tagged on March 23rd 2005.

OK, let's make some assumptions. Let's assume that Jackie D started this whole thing (I may be wrong, in fact most probably am, but let's assume anyhow) back on March 22nd. Now, back then the book tag had a few more questions ("You're stuck inside Fahrenheit 451, which book do you want to be?" and "Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?") and was limited to being sent to only 3 more people rather than 5. So, let's assume that there were on average 2 responses to each book tag.

log (10000000) / log (2) = 23.25...

log (30000000) / log (2) = 24.838...

It has been roughly 75 days since Nancy got tagged. If it takes an average of 3 days to respond to the book tag thing, then everyone in the blogosphere has probably already been tagged - assuming there was a way of telling that someone had already been tagged (without having faithfully read each post of every blogger) and that there were no multiple-tags. If there was some easy way of finding out who has not yet been tagged, then the entire blogosphere would be tagged by no later than the end of this week.

I think this sucker has run its course.

Of course, I don't expect that everyone will read this post (barring an Instalanche and a dailyKoslanche - excuse me while I stop laughing - ok, I'm all better now), and that this particularly virulent meme will continue until well after we are all sick and tired of it. In the hopes of innoculating myself against myriad future tags, I have added a link near the top of my sidebar: "I have already been BookTagged".

I think this is something we will see more often in the next few months. Pass it on. Er... wait... don't. Just do it yourself. And link to me. Yeah, that's it, link to me me me me ME ME ME.

[ irony ] Not that I'm doing this for blatant self-promotion or anything. [ /irony ]

UPDATE: I think I have found the origins of this chain. Blame Credit goes to The Pink Bee back on March 7th. That makes roughly 90 days for this sucker to visit every blogger worldwide. Thanks a heap.

UPPERDATE: Declan at Crawl Across the Ocean did a much more in-depth analysis, finding that this chain has mutated several times and even changed languages.

Will we ever find out who started it all? Maybe not. I think that it won't be going on much longer though; there just aren't enough blogs to sustain it in its present form. We're damn near all immune now, so neener neener.