Today, I got tagged by Rod with the Thinking Blogger Award.

It is an interesting meme floating around, mostly in the MyBlogLog space. The idea is that if you are tagged with the award, you get to tag five other people with the award. These sorts of memes are the chain letters of the blogosphere.

As an illustration, from the look inside MyBlogLog, we find that they have around 50,000 users, as of May 2007. Assuming that everyone who gets tagged, tags five other people, and there is no overlap or breaking of the chain, after the sixth round, we run out of people on MyBlogLog.

I tried tracking back my Thinking Blogger Award Ancestory. I (1) was tagged by Rod (2) who was tagged by Skipper (3). Skipper was tagged by Loz (4), who was tagged by Paisley (5). Paisley was tagged by Walter (6) who was tagged by Danielle (7).

With that, we’ve gone past the 50,000 members of MyBlogLog, if everyone was in MyBlogLog, there were no breaks, etc. However, Danielle illustrates where this analysis fails. She has been tagged three times already.

Are there really 50,000 blogs that make people think? ilker yoldas started this off with the comment, Too many blogs, not enough thoughts!, and I wonder if the meme has reached the end of its usefulness. After all, if I’ve been awarded a thinking blogger award, perhaps the award has finally jumped the shark.

Perhaps some of the problem is what seems to me to be various blogging ghettos. The Thinking Blogger Award seems to be stuck in the MyBlogLog world. Political bloggers, and perhaps even non-profit bloggers are all to serious for this sort of stuff. Some of them are so ghettoized, they never read or link to anything outside of their parochial community.

So, I’m going to try and break this. I’m going to save my nominations for my next post and spend time thinking about blogs beyond the SAHM/WAHM/SEO/Pet/Knitting MyBlogLog world. I’m going to try to be a connector. Let’s see where we can go with this.