Since I’ve now done my part in passing the baton, I’ll blog about the meme itself. I first saw this meme on this post by Stuart Langridge, one of the geek bloggers that I read. Then I noticed it entered the Philippines (as far as I can tell) through Markku Seguerra’s post. From there, it took several more blogs and weeks before it got passed on to me.

The complete unbroken path the meme took before it got to me is shown below. It’s not quite six degrees of separation since there are 16 intervening blogs between me and the “Adam” post

• Leenlang’s Purpledoilies - Regilyn Ordoñez

• Missyosigirl - Shelley

• Cheesecake - Abigail

• NBA Addict - Wilfred

• Blog Ko To! - Trebs

• Pusang Palaboy - Nanette Santos

• Rebelpixel Productions - Markku Seguerra

• Mathibus.com - Mathias Bynens

• Zooiblog - Rob Mientjes

• The Watchmaker Project - Matthew Pennell

• Left Brain/Right Brain - Kevin Leitch

• Joshuaink - John Oxton

• Hicksdesign - John Hicks or CollyLogic - Simon Collison

• Clagnut - Richard Rutter

• Kryogenix.org - Stuart Langridge

• Aquarionics - Nicholas Avenell

• Squaring the Circle… - Senji

• The Den of Ubiquity - Aaron V. Humphrey

Of course, the meme didn’t really start there. But the meme got renamed from the “Music Victim Meme” to the “Musical Baton” because of Aquarion (aka Nicholas Avenell). The first person, Aaron, didn’t get tagged with the meme but just copied it from these LiveJournal (or LJ) bloggers:

• 1istener

• raptortheangel

• skywise

• kirianth

Most people got stuck at skywise’s journal while tracing the meme backward (see this post). Fortunately, I got enough experience with LiveJournal blogs that I found out where he got it. From there Kirianth attributes the meme to a certain LJ blogger named “tarlia”. But a search of her LJ provides no sight of the meme.

What makes this meme interesting is that it attacked most of the high-profile web-designer bloggers starting with Richard Rutter.

Interestingly, both Rob and Mathias (near the middle of my unbroken chain) already got tagged with this meme way back in January when it was still called “estafette” (see Rob’s post and Mathias’ post). I think they were the one who first translated the meme to English from its Dutch roots. This Dutch post seems to be the earliest incarnation of the Muziekstokkie meme, found via this Japanese post tracking the meme too. (The baton meme apparently got big in Japan.)

Whew.