After being bludgeoned by a musical baton and watching my pathetic attempt at propagating a meme get ass-whooped, I was piqued to try to figure out where this meme got started in the first place.

I tried clicking back through the musical baton that was given to me, but strangely enough they led me back to google where a boh liao person happily lifted it out of the blogosphere and started messing around with his friends.

Tried to search on blog search engines; the earliest three hits brought up:

  1. BlogPulse: ayelienne: musical baton, Feb 16. It is obvious from the post that this is not the original, but note that the Microcosmos post predates this result. Attempting to hunt through the livejournal thicket brings up a dead end; I assume the post was marked friends-only.
  2. Technorati: Microcosmos, Feb 14. While it doesn’t reference any earlier post,
  3. BlogDigger: Burlap Soul, Jan 26. The trail again disappears into the LiveJournal thicket. This one was entitled “Music Baton”, so I went back to try it with Technorati, but it turned up Burlap Soul again.

So is the origin of the musical baton meme shrouded in the mysterious borgian thicket of LiveJournal? Someone please enlighten me. I’m dying to know.

Also sinceBlogPulse has a very nice blog-tracking graph feature, I went to plot the time series for this meme. I think the result speaks for itself:

In case you were wondering, mrbrown’s baton was posted on May 19. So is it sampling bias, or does mrbrown really rawk the blawgs? You decide.

It is interesting to note the mutations that this one meme went through; not just in terms of wording (having the title oscillate between “Music Baton” and “Musical Baton”, for example), but also the change from 3 to 5 recipients, the lack of need to explain ‘why’ you want to pass the meme on, etc.

Ok, back to work. (Why don’t I know the answer by now, dangnabit.)