Kottke writes more on the meme theme: "It would be interesting to track the pace of meme transmission...and the speed at which transmission seems to be increasing." It would also be interesting to track the path of meme transmission. One primitive way this is done in the scope of weblogs is with the "via" or attribute link, where a blogger gives credit to the blog where he or she spotted what they're posting about. Sometimes, you can track these links back several steps. Another related area where people are trying to more formally track such flows is with RSS headline feeds. I believe the original idea of RSS is that a site would simply offer an RSS-formatted index of what's on their site, and others would use that to link back to them. But with all the crazy aggregation and syndication stuff being done by folks like Moreover, UserLand, ClickFeed, and Oreilly with Meerkat, one RSS feed can be the input for a system that then outputs it again, possibly categorized, commentated, or otherwise editorialized. Information you're reading on one site could have conceivably gone through a long chain of such services. But since there's nothing built into RSS to track this, this path is lost. The next version of RSS may account for such things. This isn't exactly meme tracking, but it could be -- especially where there is an editorial layer. And even more so if you think beyond just headlines (what RSS is mostly used for today) to weblogs syndicating other weblogs, picking and choosing the posts (memes, potentially?) that they like. Hmmm...