I am amazed how the imported "four of everything" meme happily wagged its tail around the Romanian blogosphere (I know how some of you hate how blogosphere sounds but I cannot think of a better syntagm), with panache and vitality. Two years ago its journey would have been ridiculously short—I bet it wouldn't survive more than two-three iterations. Nowadays it managed to involve tens on blogs I read and—as stupid as it looks—I did it, too. Because it's useful.

I think this is a tipping point and I'll forward three working hypotheses (increasingly outrageous) about it.

The first meaning of the phenomenon, in my opinion, is that the Romanian blogosphere becomes a dense enough universe to propagate ideas. When Dragos of @rgumente gave an interview about blogs and the information he provided was treated in an unprofessional manner by the newspaper employee, a significant number of bloggers protested along with Dragos, not only resonating but further relaying the message.

The second meaning I think I see as resulting from the way the meme spread is the fact that the Romanian blogosphere became not only dense enough, but large enough to lose it from sight as a whole. Gone are the days when reading Petroniu's RBA and IRBNLA was all there is to it—today I think there are only a few who know what I'm talking about. Now there are too many blogs to read all (rss.mioritics has 747 feeds indexed and probably more than three quarters are probably blogs) and the system self-organizes by dividing into manageable clusters of similar affinities. I think the meme traced and mapped not only those affinities but also grew dendrites that reach across the clusters. Some successful, some not—but of a great efficiency as a whole, compared to other types of (virtual) social networking.

My final guess—and I really stick my neck out with this one—is that, like a power jolt traversing a brain, this meme awakened the Romanian blogosphere's conscience and unlocked a new level of self-awareness.

You've come a long way, baby!