I noticed an interesting link today on my weblog referers list from panoramas.dk so I went to see who was linking to me and what it was all about. It turned out to be the same site that hosts the panoramic view of Everest that I posted a while back [May 24]. Anyway, they have an interesting little article on the linking history for the Everest panorama. It tells how the site went from having only two backward links to having more than "800 and 200.000 visitors in 24 days" [The power of the Weblogs - Blogging Mt Everest]. Weblogs certainly have that power.

The weblogging community talks a lot about memes because weblogs are an effective vector for the transmission of ideas.

Meme (pron. meem): A contagious information pattern that replicates by parasitically infecting human minds and altering their behavior, causing them to propagate the pattern. (Term coined by Dawkins, by analogy with "gene".) Individual slogans, catch-phrases, melodies, icons, inventions, and fashions are typical memes. An idea or information pattern is not a meme until it causes someone to replicate it, to repeat it to someone else. All transmitted knowledge is memetic [What is a meme?].

The means by which a virus is transferred from host to host is called a vector. One of the primary vectors for transmitting many viruses is the mosquito. A meme is like a virus in that it is reproduced and undergoes mutation. It is also like a virus in other ways: it can't reproduce itself, it can be expressed as a digital sequence (letters or RNA/DNA) and it can be harmful to its host. The weblogging community is very effective at transmitting memes. Once a meme enters the weblogging cloud, it can work its way around, sometimes being faithfully reproduced and other times being altered during replication. In this way, a weblog is analogous to a mosquito and the readers/writers of weblogs are the hosts.

(Of course, if you think of the weblogger as both the host and the vector, then meme transmission becomes more analogous to Night of the Living Dead or Blade)

The Everest panorama is a meme; a simple meme but a meme none the less. There are many more of them out there and, in a way, all ideas can be thought of in this way. They cannot and do not exist without the medium of human communication and thought, yet they are external to any given human being and cannot easily be controlled. I would imagine that the transmission of memes could be effectively modeled in much the same way as organic viruses or computer viruses are.

Another interesting type of virulent meme is the urban legend/chain letter. I got one of those in my inbox today [THIS IS TOO SERIOUS]. People fall for urban legends because they have precisely the right elements which cause humans to reproduce them, just as a virus has the right elements to cause a cell to reproduce it. 10:18:28 PM    comment []  

Some kid gets caught smoking in the boy's room by his principal, in the heat of the moment he throws out some of his favorite explitives, which turns into a disorderly conduct charge, to which his lawyer argues that it was protected free speech, then Ars decides to take a break from talking about computers and technology to fill us all in on the socially grounded origins of "bad words" [ArsTechnica]. 1:25:28 PM    comment []