I came across an interesting piece today from Leveraging Ideas all about Memes. What are memes you may ask?

According to Wikipedia, a meme consists of any unit of cultural information, such as a practice or idea, that gets transmitted verbally or by repeated action from one mind to another. Examples include thoughts, ideas, theories, practices, habits, songs, dances and moods and terms such as race, culture, and ethnicity. Memes propagate themselves and can move through a "culture" in a manner similar to the behavior of a virus.

As a unit of cultural evolution, a meme in some ways resembles a gene. Richard Dawkins, in his book, The Selfish Gene, recounts how and why he coined the term meme to describe how one might extend Darwinian principles to explain the spread of ideas and cultural phenomena. He gave as examples tunes, catch-phrases, beliefs, clothing-fashions, and the technology of building arches.

That said, here is the article...I'd be curious your thoughts.

-Bill

Social Media

10 Interesting Memes Plucked From The Blogosphere

I’ve been noticing a lot of memes floating around the social media/2.0 space over the last two weeks and I decided to pluck 10 of my favorites. If you haven’t been glued to Google Reader or Twitter, here is a run-down of memes worth paying attention to…

Socialprise: Social tools + enterprise = “socialprise.” According to RedWriteWeb this meme represents one of the biggest shifts in business today. AVC questions whether it’s an oxymoron.

Suckage: Refers to a general feeling among smart technologists such as Umair Haque that entrepreneurs aren’t addressing real problems but instead creating ’me-too’s.’ Umair has even issued a challenge.

PaaS: Refers to Platforms as a Service (as opposed to Software as a Service). This meme was coined by Tony Bishop who sees it as the invasion of the consumer web into the enterprise

Twitter Liberation Organization (TLO)*: Annoying concept kicked around by Techcrunch, Hank Williams and others suggesting that Twitter is ‘too important to continue with current ownership.’ The idea: open-source it

Distributed Polling: Fred Wilson believes we are better solving problems collectively. He posted a poll on YHOO stock price which was picked up and published on a number of leading blogs.

Singularity: Peter Thiel has donated to another interesting, albeit obtuse, non-profit complementing his gifts to advance radical life extension. Wouldn’t you love to be a fly on the wall in the next Facebook board meeting?

ReadBurner: Adam Ostrow editor of Mashable acquired ReadBurner to help socialize Google Reader. Google itself, can’t seem to do the job.

TwitPitch: Stowe Boyd, suggests a new way of ‘pitching’ limited to 140 characters. Stowe calls it the future, even though he is more interested in the present(er)

Dimensionalizing: John Bothwick asks: What would the web look like if you picked it up and looked at the bottom? John believes we need new metaphors to understand and place dimensions around what a web experience is.

GoogleWhack: A new Greenspan-ism “pale recession” irked Paul Kedrosky and led to his suggestion that Greenspan is a ninja SEO (or personal brander) playing a game called Googlewhack.

*TLO is lexicon I’m coining to describe people referring/supporting this annoying idea