Fresh Meme Speed

I’ve had to end the experiment earlier than expected. A stolen laptop a few weeks ago (the date co-incides with the last posting) meant weeks of data recovery/dealing with police and insurance companies.

In the meantime the updates to Fresh Meme Speed stopped, so now I’ve decided to close the experiment. Experiments by their nature have a start and a finish, and should stop eventually. It would have been nice to finish with a good result but now the window of opportunity has closed and I must use my time for other things.

There’s undoubtedly some irony in the fact that the 7th result on Google for “Sergey Brin” is a very odd site titled MySergeyBrin.  It ranks very high for such an obviously bad spoof site…

Today  I sent out the first trackback.  A Stanford student called Jenna has a blog which has one of the few photos of Seth Godin and his Purple Cow milk carton.  I decided to link to it, and send a trackback to see what happens.

The first book I purchased by Seth Godin was called “The Purple Cow.” It talks about how to make your business remarkable. Perhaps the most interesting thing to me about the book was that it was proof that - unlike so many others - Seth Godin can talk the talk and walk the walk. What was the proof? My copy of the book (the limited edition no less) was delivered in a custom printed milk carton.  The result?  It sits on my bookshelf in my office and starts a conversation whenever people see it.

It’s surprisingly hard to find a picture of the milk carton online - this seems be one of the very few…

Lovely stuff.

Robert Scoble blogs.  So does his brother Alex Scoble (for ComputerWorld).  How many other Scobles blog???

Stephen Fry has a brother called Roger.  Obviously his parents had impeccable taste in names.

Sergey Brin still has a home page at Stanford - his old university.  It’s got a photo of him on it, where not only does he look young, but he also put some sort of post-editing-effects that make it look like his shirt and shoulders are rippling. It’s very odd.

My guess is that he put the filter on the wrong way, and actually intended it to make it look like his hair was moving in the wind.  Mind you, considering it’s an indoor photo, even that would make it look weird.

Presumably he now has enough money to be able to afford a decent portrait.

In a podcast of a London conference, Seth Godin admitted that it’s a really bad move to put one of those “suction cap childrens bath toys” on your forehead.  He did just this while bathing one of his kids.  It seemed like a harmless idea.  It did to me too.  until he explained that he couldn’t get it off. Until he pulled really hard.

This motion burst a whole bunch of tiny blood vessels near the skin, and left him with a bright red circle in the middle of his forehead for a few days.

Lesson learned.

According to a newspaper report in 2003, “before posting an entry in his personal weblog, Robert Scoble always pauses and considers how he would justify its contents to three people: his boss, his wife and Steve Ballmer.”

Considering how often he blogs, his life must be full of pauses.  Presumably though he has one less pause to make - he no longer works for Steve Ballmer.

Contrary to popular belief, Stephen Fry is actually a bit of a technophile.  He blogs, has an iPhone and knows how to use technical terms like ‘DUN’ in the right context. The Guardian technology writers have wondered out loud - on their blog - if he could write gadget reviews for them.