I Won't Even Pretend To Understand

I should preface this post by giving you a brief explanation of the anxiety I feel when confronted by any form of chain letter. Recipes, stickers, panties (yech! - who wants to receive panties from strangers?), cash, you name it...I ignore them all. When I get them, usually via email these days, I respond by staring emptily at the computer screen and then hitting delete. OH, the pressure that they bring...will I answer them in time, will I break the chain, will some poor sick child on the northern coast of Pakzukikstanraine be able to set the world record for getting the most greeting cards during the fourth full moon of the Chinese New Year? I'm burdened by those things, you could say.

Anyway, I saw where Diane has tagged me with some interweb virus, only it's not really a virus, it's really a chain blog thing, and I will play along for two reasons and two reasons only: 1) Diane has been a loyal and faithful BooMama reader and 2) I made pork chops and gravy tonight, and while I was making it I thought, "I bet Diane's gravy is good," which made me think of her love for home cooking, which reminded me of her blog, which reminded me of her tag.

Therefore, I've "caught" the virus and I should insert some witty comment here like "but I don't have fever!" but eh, it's been a long day, and I just don't have it in me. :-)

So here's how the originator of this lovely virus explains the goal:

"Pearsonified has started a small, casual social experiment, it’s called “The Indie Virus.” Here’s how Pearsonified describes this experiment:The experiment, henceforth referred to as “The Indie Virus,” has two goals:

* To bring exposure to lesser known blogs (especially those outside of Technorati’s top 100)
* To explore the metrics behind a viral linking campaign launched by the “little guys” (less popular blogs)"

Here's how BooMama describes the virus: Pearsonified wants to get lots of hits to his blog so that he goes up in the blog rankings on Technorati. Each of us who has been tagged has had to link to his blog at least twice to get the links to put in our posts. Technorati ranks blogs by how many people link to those blogs, and if you figure that 4,000 blogs have participated in this tag, then that means 4,000 people have linked to Pearsonified, which means he/she goes way up in the rankings.

So "[exploring] the metrics" is a fancy way of saying, "HOW MANY OF YOU PEOPLE WILL LINK TO ME?"

But that's just my BooMama theory, made special for you with a dollop of homegrown cynicism. :-)

ANYWAY, I don't know who to tag, because most of the blogs I read seem to be tagged already. Or else they're not the "lesser known" blogs that Pearsonified mentions.

So if you have a blog and you would like to be tagged, leave me a comment. Or Diane (or anyone else), if you know someone you'd like for me to tag, just let me know in the comments, and I'll be more than happy to tag them. I just don't know who has/hasn't participated so far.

And if one of y'all is really bored tonight, just click on those Pearsonified links about 100 times. It'll totally rock his/her world. :-)