De-Lurking Week

Well, once again I come to things a little late. So late in fact I will be skipping de-lurking week this year, seeing as how I managed to completely miss it. Don’t let that stop you, though, feel free to give me a shout-out if you happen to catch this post.

After clicking through a couple of links I thought this might be an interesting experiment of tracking the De-Lurking Week posts across the blogosphere. I am fascinated by how information propagates across the internet and this is a prime chance to run something down.

Here is my path to the source of Inter/National De-Lurking Week:

1. I got this from Friday, January 13th post on Beaucoupkevin.com
2. He links to Scipio’s De-Lurking Week post at The Absorbascon and Ragnell’s Reveal Thyself! post at The Written Word of Ragnell the Foul, Hermit Queen of the Night Shift.
3. Scipio did not link to anything, so that branch is dead, however Ragnell linked to both Clare’s Hellllloooo?? Post at Ink and Incapability and the Hello Out There post over at Paper Napkin.
4. Clare links to One Bright Star (1B*) Reignited, who discusses National De-Lurking Week here, and to Paper Napkin, thus bringing us full circle.
5. Bright Star (B*) links to Liz’s Comment! Comment! Comment! post at MysteryMommy and the Paper Napkin post.
6. Liz then links back to the post at Paper Napkin, which leads me to conclude that this was something stirred up by the good folks at Paper Napkin.

Now the Google search to see what I can find.

• 50,500 hits on the search “national de-lurking week” with, surprise surprise, Paper Napkin on the top of the heap.
• 80,500 hits on the search national + de-lurking + week with, whaddaya know, Paper Napkin again on the top o’ the pile.
• 100 hits on the search “international de-lurking week” with Paper Napkin once again leading the charge.
• 26,400 hits on the search international + de-lurking + week with, yes, again Paper Napkin rules the roost.

I think it is pretty clear that Paper Napkin is the most popular site dealing with De-Lurking Week, and I suspect they started this particular meme. I wonder how long it would take to track down all 160,000 results for the above searches and render them into a graphic demonstrating how the meme actually propagated itself.


Other encounters with De-Lurking Week:

As I was getting caught up with my blog reading I found a post discussing De-Lurking Week on A Perfectly Cromulent Blog. Unfortunately Pete does not link to where he read about de-lurking week, so I cannot run down the path there.