A few days ago, I followed a link from Fray friend Hipparchia's blog Gun Tamga that led to another blog, Rough Theory, which belongs to an Australian Ph.D. candidate, N. Pepperell, who, I was glad to find, shares some interests (urban planning, cultural studies, evolution) with me. The post on Rough Theory to which Gun Tamga linked concerned plagiarism, which prompted me to post a comment to it, linking to the lyrics of Tom Lehrer's song "Lobachevsky" (to which I also had occasion to link in my college football rant directly below this post).
Rough Theory also referred to another blog called Acephalous (like the acephalous horseman who pursued poor Ichabod Crane in Washington Irving's The Legend of Sleepy Hollow), which I finally got around to looking at today. It's the project of one Scott Eric Kauffman, evidently an academic in California who is about to attend a meeting of the Modern Language Association. It's his intention to present to the MLA the result of an experiment in transmission of a "meme" (the brainchild of Richard Dawkins) through links between blogs. Anyway, he's asked that whoever reads his post on this meme-transmission experiment first link their blog to the post (as I've just done), ask readers to do the same (I'm asking you, please, to do so, linking directly to the post I've given you the link for just above, and not to my post), and then ping Technorati (very easy - just follow the instructions on the linked page).
Believe me, this is not a chain letter, or the moral equivalent thereof. No money or other goodies will come your way if you follow these instructions (at least I'd be surprised if it happened), and no misfortune will befall you just because you choose to ignore them (of that I'm quite sure).
Update: I may have to modify my "no ... goodies will come your way" prediction, as I've seen a large increase in hits on my site meter since I posted this morning. I can only guess that this is because I've pinged Technorati. Maybe I should do that more often.
So, anyway, if your attitude toward visitors on your blog is, "The more, the merrier" (as is mine), following the directions three paragraphs above may well be to your benefit.
