On Being Memed

Kent Newsome – happily returning to blogging this month after an extended period AWOL – asks me to “Name five reasons why you do (or do not) respond to memes” and tagged me in the process. The answer is that I do and this is why:

1. He did it so very nicely that I would feel incredibly rude not to at least respond. Curse that lower-middle class, protestant English background!

2. These blogging meme things make for quite snappy, interesting posts that I think help us to form a bit more of a connection with each other. Much as people might appear to be disgruntled about getting tagged, I reckon they’re secretly pleased that they’re in the club.

3. Or is it 2a? They reinforce a sense that we bloggers do belong to a sort of club or brother/sisterhood or thinktank even that’s quite different to anything that’s existed before. I think we’re very privileged to be alive in a time when this is possible. Consequently, I’ve decided to make all my nominees people whose blogs I’ve started reading relatively recently and may not know I read them religiously.

4. Because it is a game and games are a good thing. If you think that games have no place in the serious world of your blog, then you are taking it far too seriously.

5. The gypsy’s curse would otherwise fall upon me and all those of my house unto the end of ages.

Here are my choices for the next round:

Lee Hopkins writes a great PR and marketing blog and is very funny, so should be good value. No expectations, then, Lee.

Allen Stern has stormed into the Web 2.0/Techcrunch space over the past four or five months and made up loads of ground already. Without the politics.

Matthew Chen of Megite invented Megite – an excellent and personalisable alternative to Techmeme – and has worked on it tirelessly.

Alan Patrick writes a fab blog about Web 2.0ish stuff too. And he could do with more silly stuff like this on his site. Hehe.

Stuart Dredge writes the new launch from Shiny about Web 2.0 and Mobile 2.0 and this might test the boundaries of how corporate they’ve become…

Possibly Related Posts:

• Be Good
• My Mate Megite
• Flogging a Dead Blog