Alright, this is a post about two things. First, it’s about New Labour: some chaps called Tim Ireland and Balders, who I believe are friends of Chris, have put together a really excellent video presentation (warning: its a 1.3MB flash video, with good noise) outlining exactly where Labour has failed to deliver, and why the Tories would have been worse. It’s entitled, or at least themed, “I see red”. It goes by quickly, but is damn entertaining, damn informative and extremely well done. Check it out.

The second thing I’m blogging about is, well, again, blogging. A meta-level post: the point being, why regurgitate stuff on my blog that Chris has already posted on his, and no doubt has been blogged about everywhere else in the world? Well, because that’s how memes propogate: a meme, a viral piece of knowledge, is as successful as it is profligate: by my talking about it to my somewhat esoteric audience (which does include more people than just Chris and Tom, honest – about 5,000 hits this month, I think), the various Blog tracking services (Technorati, Blogdex etc.,) track the popularity of certain memes and rank them accordingly – they do this by scanning blogs with ‘bots – web programs that trawl for information. In fact, a substantial part of the traffic this site has seen is due to these network agents.

It’s really a remarkable way to track the progression of an idea – hence these remarks.

The impacts to branding, guerilla marketing and dirty tricks campaigners are reasonably obvious, but fortunately most good memes are still free and free of commercial sponsorship. Be interesting to see how it goes; the Blog seems to be on the up-and-up in terms of popularity (every loser has one), and increasingly communities of well read, well thought people doing more than rant about random internet crap are popping up. Watch this space.