An Independent Meme-Spreading Experiment Meme! (public)

[adeline]

Who wants to take part in a fun, harmless, LJ-meme experiment?

An Independent Meme-Spreading Experiment Meme!

Intrigued yet? Here's the deal. The icon meme popping up all over - which for the record I think is an awesome idea - has made me wonder how long it would take for a one particular (simple, fast) meme to spread all over LiveJournal, in and out of friends-lock (this for comparison purposes).

Because any of the existing, well-established memes would require an insurmountable amount of investigating and calculating to track from Journal A to Journal B and back to Journal A, I got this idea of a meme that would consist in a countdown originating right here on gossy16.

The current friends-locked count is *1000*
The current public count is *1000*

The process is as follows

If you have been specifically tagged by a friend to do this meme,

• Substract 1 from the friends-locked count (green). Don't touch the blue count.
  
• Tag 5 friends, avoiding ones mutual with the person who tagged you. If in doubt, you can check your tagger's profile : your mutual friends are bolded
  
• Repost these instructions and the new counts in a friends-locked entry.
  
• Repeat the post in a public entry, tagging any and every one who wishes to do the meme. (We apologize sincerely to your flist for getting it twice.)

If you found this meme in a public entry,

• Substract 1 from the public count (blue). Don't touch the green count.
  
• Repost these instructions and the new counts in a public entry, tagging any and every one who wishes to do the meme.
  
• Don't friends-lock and/or tag any specific friends.

When one of the counts reaches 0, please report so here and keep the meme going until both counts are over. Then please let me know.

Any questions on the process? Ask here. Thanks!

• When the meme shows up on your flist again, please tell me here and try to supply a rough estimate of how long it took.

Restrictions

Don't post this to communities.

• It pisses off people,
  
• alienates them against a project,
  
• and it will sabotage the results (people getting it back sooner than they should)

The theories are

In a variable amount of time, the meme will pop up again on your flist and you may notice the following

• the green count will come down faster than the blue count
  
• the green count is much easier to track than the blue count
  
• the blue count will reach zero much later, having spread wider than your flist's flists, etc...
  
• you might never see the end of the blue count, depending on how much traffic your journal attracts

More to suggest? Please do. :)

That's it!
Thanks in advance to any and all participants. I know my idea of fun is warped, but heh, at the very least this could turn out quite interesting! If I ever get around to analyzing the data collected from this experiment and you are interested in my potential conclusions, please place a request now, and I'll get back to you as they become tangible.