WoW bloggers take off and unite with Sixth meme
What's that image above? Why, that's a screenshot of Azshara before the goblins took over, taken for our massive series of Before the Shattering galleries we put together just before Cataclysm launched. It also happens to be the sixth image from the sixth subfolder in my images folder, which leads us to a meme started by Gnomeaggedon from the blog Armageddon's Coming -- a meme that has taken off with alarming speed.
The premise is simple: Head into your images folder, select the sixth subfolder, grab the sixth image in the folder, post the image, and select six bloggers to tag for the next part of the meme. Those people post their own sixth images, tag six more bloggers, and so on. Those of you who are skilled at math can already see where this is going.
For those who can't quite visualize it, Navimie over at The Daily Frostwolf decided to take on the onerous task of tracking the tagbacks with a simple flowchart that ended up being far from simple. Her first flowchart, made at 30 hours into the challenge, looks relatively straightforward -- but the second flowchart, created at 60 hours in, is a mass of names and arrows pointing wildly this way and that. For a more straightforward approach, Martha over at Martha.net decided to create a flowchart that is much more easily read.
The inadvertent side effect of all of this is that it's brought together the community of WoW bloggers in a big way. Bloggers are being tagged that nobody had heard of until this point, and more are being tagged every day. In a month of little WoW news, bloggers haven't had a lot to talk about -- and the Sixth meme's been just the thing to get them talking, posting again, and saying hello. The whole action of posting an image has revealed some pretty weird and cool images from all over the WoW blogosphere.
Gnomeaggedon had a few very specific reasons for starting the meme, but one stands out in particular: to make contact with the far reaches of the WoW blogosphere. I'd have to say he accomplished that in spades, all the while reminding us that there really aren't that many degrees of separation between those who choose to write about WoW. It makes me wonder how many degrees of separation there are between those who play WoW as well -- including all the random people we encounter in dungeons and raids.
If you've been looking for new WoW blogs to read, head over to Martha.net and check out the full list of tagged bloggers -- there are tons of gems on that list.
