A while back I joined in the linkage storm for a stupid blond joke. Since then I have seen thousands of loads a day on that page (peaking at around 7,000 unique visitors a day and never falling to less than 1,000 unique visitors a day), making it my second biggest hit ever. (My Operation Game costume build log peaked around 30,000 unique visitors.) And I'm not the only one.
So, stupid or not, the joke has evidently tapped into some web zeitgeist. A powerful memeforce that has sucked millions of web browsers into a veritable whirlpool of linked blogs!
Given this popularity it should come as no surprise that someone tried to map the joke's links. And yet, although he analyzed more than four hundred links, the map is incomplete. Plus it is a snapshot from January 12th; so it is already two weeks out of date.
I'm on there as link number 7, and he only shows me as having one inbound link for the joke. However I know from Technorati and Icerocket searches that I currently have more than eight unique inbound links. (Note: Those searches are only for one form of the URL, other forms of the URL also have results.) In fact I'm fairly certain I had at least three inbound links on January 12th.
If you extrapolate from my small sample (admittedly not a good practice) this means that today there is nearly a full order of magnitude more links for this joke than the graph shows! Almost certainly hidden (from search engine) links in forums and emails account for another order of magnitude beyond that. (I'm guessing of course. And I have no idea how you would go about verifying my theory either.)
Consider also; the oldest known link for the joke is more than two years old! Apparently the meme has been in the wild for years and only saw this amazing growth in the last month. Meaning that there is an fascinating parallel between this meme and the spread of a virulent disease in a population: For years the meme was fairly inactive, limited to a few Typhoid Mary blogs. Then it started to grow, making its way across the Internet in only weeks. If left unchecked it might have infected the entire blogosphere by now, but apparently there are many blogs with a natural resistance to dumb blonde jokes and that was enough to slow it down.
Right now I'm thinking that some scientist or graduate student should do an in-depth study of the blonde joke meme. I would be especially interested in knowing if it followed the distributions predicted by Benford's Law.
I'm serious! If you can use dollar bills as analogues for infectious disease, why not dumb blonde jokes?
So, stupid or not, the joke has evidently tapped into some web zeitgeist. A powerful memeforce that has sucked millions of web browsers into a veritable whirlpool of linked blogs!
Given this popularity it should come as no surprise that someone tried to map the joke's links. And yet, although he analyzed more than four hundred links, the map is incomplete. Plus it is a snapshot from January 12th; so it is already two weeks out of date.
I'm on there as link number 7, and he only shows me as having one inbound link for the joke. However I know from Technorati and Icerocket searches that I currently have more than eight unique inbound links. (Note: Those searches are only for one form of the URL, other forms of the URL also have results.) In fact I'm fairly certain I had at least three inbound links on January 12th.
If you extrapolate from my small sample (admittedly not a good practice) this means that today there is nearly a full order of magnitude more links for this joke than the graph shows! Almost certainly hidden (from search engine) links in forums and emails account for another order of magnitude beyond that. (I'm guessing of course. And I have no idea how you would go about verifying my theory either.)
Consider also; the oldest known link for the joke is more than two years old! Apparently the meme has been in the wild for years and only saw this amazing growth in the last month. Meaning that there is an fascinating parallel between this meme and the spread of a virulent disease in a population: For years the meme was fairly inactive, limited to a few Typhoid Mary blogs. Then it started to grow, making its way across the Internet in only weeks. If left unchecked it might have infected the entire blogosphere by now, but apparently there are many blogs with a natural resistance to dumb blonde jokes and that was enough to slow it down.
Right now I'm thinking that some scientist or graduate student should do an in-depth study of the blonde joke meme. I would be especially interested in knowing if it followed the distributions predicted by Benford's Law.
I'm serious! If you can use dollar bills as analogues for infectious disease, why not dumb blonde jokes?
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