I have finally figured out why this blog isn't more popular.

I miss crazy ideas like this. Nova Spivack called it a "go meme," but when you go through it closely you realize it's a blog version of the old chain letter.

Fill out this survey. Put your own data at the end of it. Pass it on.

Don't break the chain.

Why didn't I think of tiat?

Actually I shouldn't be so flip.

There is a lot to learn, about how ideas spread, about how popularity builds, about how people go from being unknown to known, through this universe of blogging and search engines.

It is, in fact, a meta-universe of ideas. It has its own DNA, called RSS. It has its own pecking order, based on Technorati rankings. And it has its own language -- meme is a blog term meaning a commonly-held idea, and Spivack considers himself a student of memes.

I've actually been close to Spivack for many years without knowing him at all. Back when I was at NetGuide, in the mid-1990s, our offices were a few floors down from his on Park Avenue in New York. At that time he was running Earthweb, an early Web publishing venture, and for a time his company even bought some of my stuff, as part of its managing the Datamation site.

That was a long time ago, of course, in a galaxy far, far away.

Nowadays everyone in the blogosphere has two lives, the one they live in the world and the one they live online. Spivack is trying to make a living there.

It used to be called PR.