I don’t usually participate in these kinds of things, but this activity can be kind of revealing. Procedure is simple: clear your browser’s address bar and type each letter of the alphabet, recording for each the first entry that pops up (or that autocompletes). What does this say about how you spend your time?
- a - archive.org (where I grab lots of music and audio)
- b - bloglines (but of course)
- c - cosmopoetica (natch)
- d - del.icio.us (my daily bookmark list)
- e - Evil Genius Chronicles (geekery and podcasts)
- f - flickr (yeah baby)
- g - gmail (I knew this one)
- h - HG Poetics (Henry Gould’s poetry blog)
- i - IMDB (Internet Movie Database)
- j - CogDogBlog (Alan Levine’s EdTech weblog)
- k - Kleptones Site (home of the Hip Hopera and other)
- l - Creative Commons Mailing List Archives (hmmm)
- m - Maud Newton’s Weblog (lit links, politics, rants)
- n - Tijuana Christmas LP (you don’t wanna know)
- o - Ink on My Hands (writing, lit weblog)
- p - Art, Love, Family, and Psychedelics (same)
- q - Quotations.com (what, you think I make this stuff up?)
- r - RottenTomatoes (movie review metasource)
- s - Slate (I wanted to cheat and put Shirky.com here)
- t - Triplopia (poetry mag)
- u - Uncle Krinkly (Cookin with Uncle Crinkly on the Innernet)
- v - Vinyl Orphanage (where forgotten and unwanted records find solace)
- w - Webjay (music playlist sharing, wordpress.org a close second)
- x - Nothing!
- y - Yahoo Search Blog (!?)
- z - Zotz (poetry blog)
One thing this list illustrates is how much RSS feeds have changed my web consumption. These are either information/social/reference sites where RSS doesn’t make sense or can’t meet searching needs, sites with missing or incomplete feeds (Listen up Slate bastards), or sites with content interesting enough to bounce me out of Bloglines and into the site itself…
Other lessons: not a lot of sites I go to start with K or X. I need to spend more time working and less time playing.
I detest the word “meme.” One of the things I loved most about Gladwell’s “The Tipping Point” is the lovely job he did of tying epidemiological thought to sociological observations on the propagation of ideas without falling back on that wholly unneccessary word. I’m put off by all of the smattering of Dawkins I’ve read; meme seems just an egregious example of needlessly multiplying invented entities. I imagine old William of Occam wincing every time it’s uttered.
Cool fucking game, ‘though. B^) Can’t wait to try it. But I clean out my history pretty regularly, so the results might be skewed.
Well, call it what you want, I still look forward to seeing yours
I personally think that, over the last couple of decades, “meme” has taken on enough connotations that it effectively has a meaning that is not equal to its “synonyms” (nor is it equal to Dawkins’ original coinage in the 70s). As a writer, I’d expect you to have a bit more fun in the connotation game and the inventiveness of language, and perhaps be more sensitive to the non-reflexivity of most purported synonyms and stand-ins…