1. The word “meme”, which is a kind of cultural virus, was coined by Richard Dawkins in his book The Selfish Gene. Now he’s more famous a rampant atheist, so he’s went from spreading the idea of meme to spreading an actual meme.

2. Memes are 32 years old, while viral marketing is an impressionable 12 years old.

3-10. Memes transmit themselves through our culture via seven general patterns identified by Aaron Lynch. The seven patterns are:

1. If your meme convinces people to have more kids, it will spread faster because your kids tend to buy into your view of the world, at least until they realize that they know everything and that you are a just a hollow shell of a human, devoured by memes from the inside.

2. If you are a separatist in some cult in Utah, then your kids may not have anyone else to listen to, and your meme will stick for lack of a better meme, unless your kids invent their own better meme, which is very likely, especially if you invented your own meme.

3. Proselytism. That is, your meme needs to get outside the family, because if it’s just a family thing it ain’t gonna spread. And you want this thing to spread like the 1918 flu epidemic, don’t you?

4. Your meme’s hosts should launch a full-on war against any competing memes. All you have to do is make your meme the One True Meme, designed to weave itself into people’s sense of how the world works. This will put its hosts in automatic attack mode when any alternative memes try to get in the way or hijack your meme.

5. You need lock-in: tight rules, tithing, some sense of duty, or anything else your meme can use to keep its hosts from considering its alternatives.

6. How is your meme elevator pitch? Do people “get it” right away, or do they have to struggle to understand what the hell you’re talking about? Is your meme culturally unorthodox? Because it’s going to be a hard sell if you stray too far from the mainstream.

7. And finally but most importantly, why should people care about your meme? I mean, if they are going to allow their souls to be taken over by this thing you’ve designed, what’s in it for them? Preferably there are societal as well as personal rewards involved.

11. memepool.com is a site started in 1998 to track interesting web sites. It was actually kind of popular for a while, but I think delicious, reddit, and digg won out. Which puts into question the potency of the meme of memes, doesn’t it?

12. …until you realize you’re getting the hard sell on memes right now.

13. Memes can be cultural ideas, symbols, or practices.

14. They are spread via speech, gestures, rituals, or other “imitable phenomena” like alien hand signals, if you’re an alien and if aliens even have hands.

15. I invented a meme recently, it’s called the Flag of Equal Marriage.

16. The word actually is intended to be analogous to genes. Memes and genes, because memes self-replicate like selfish genes. Memes can block other memes as genes can block other genes, and so on.

17. Memetics is the field devoted to the study of memes. Which means you can be a memeticist, and I think a lot of us are, but we call ourselves something else like “director of viral marketing” or maybe “trend monkey”.

18. In fact, there was a peer refereed Journal of Memetics, but it died in 2005! I think if it were called Journal of Trend Monkeying, it might have held on.

19. Not only are there memeticists, there are radical memeticists! These folks want to put memes at the center of a materialistic theory of mind and of personal identity. If that doesn’t blow your mind, I don’t know what will.

20. Memes don’t really stand alone, because if they did they’d be irrelevant. They’re part of a larger ecosystem of memes. They are woven into this ecosystem, composed of networks of cultural associations, mental structures, etc.

21. These clusters of memes are called memeplexes, as in meme complexes. If you’re talking about the fashion industry, you might even say “meme industrial complex,” but good luck turing that into a cute portmanteau.

22. Memes can evolve, of course. They have to keep up with the Jones’ memes!

23. Language just might be the first and most important memetic infection in your life.

24. An internet meme is like an inside joke. Internet memes and internet fame are celebrated at the annual ROFLCon conference. (Will it last, or will it go the way of the memepool?)

25. Some people pronounce “meme” like “memory,” but I think it’s pronounced like “dream”.

(Thanks, Wikipedia!)

Wow, yet another huge concession by the music industry. Music piracy is like a mass protest right now, and half the people participating don’t even recognize the significance of their actions.

So a company like Ruckus builds an app and gets to be a kind of middleman, “selling” college students’ attention to both labels and advertisers. What a great deal for Ruckus. They’re like YouTube, but rather than rely on user-generated content, they’ll rely on label-generated content.

But why do we need a separate company to do this? Does the music industry’s business model not give them room to seek attention directly, advertise to it, and cash in that way? MTV has lived off of advertising forever. So, given the fall of CDs, why aren’t we seeing labels transition into “media” companies?

Maybe because they’re already pwned by bigger “media” companies?

I am tired of sending people to Amazon from my blog to find media. I want a web site that has a static page for everything that Amazon has, with links to many different sources for acquisition: your local libraries, sites that let you trade with people, your local independent bookstores, and then, yes, if you really have to, an online bookseller.

What I’m talking about is a site that promotes the library and the local economy at the same time. Have you thought lately about how great the library is? The library is a network that can get you pretty much anything. It saves trees and oil by sharing a local resource. And now that we’ve lost most of our town squares, it is one of the few local non-commercial community spots left. What’s more, you’ve already paid for it in your tax bill, so it is a wise financial move. Of course, libraries don’t have many copies of the hottest new books and movies, so that’s where the independent bookstore comes in.

I know about WorldCat, and I’m excited to see the upcoming WorldCat.org. But even with a new face, they don’t have circulation data. I wish libraries had open APIs like Amazon does, where you could query availability, request books, and so on. I’ve heard about “Library 2.0,” but where is it? I’ve read about LibraryLookup. I’ve seen Google Print. None of give the complete answer when the readers’ question is “what is the fastest, cheapest way for me to borrow/acquire/read/view X?”

And isn’t that always the question?

Well, no. Other questions might be “what did people think of this book?”, “what other library books did people check out when they checked this one out?”, and “how can I save this book for later checkout/purchase?”

I don’t know of a site that answers even one of these questions and includes my local library.

There’s too much excellent music in this world that gets overlooked.

An album series idea. Every four months, go through all the waning major label CDs from the preceding quarter that never got off the ground and pull together the gem songs from these albums. The distinction here is that these artists are not indie at all. They all wanted to be hip hop/pop stars, but it just didn’t work out. The music might still be damn good.

possible titles

- Expensive Music by Broke Artists
- It’s a Ms. (for the female artist off-shoot)
- The Best of Unpopular Music (or just Unpop— why isn’t this a popular genre already?)
- Tepid Greats
- Great Artists Without Sunglasses (the cloudy day series)
- Debt Relief
- Solid Pyrite
- Overlooked and Underpaid

a few good items from the NY Times today:

a compelling op-ed about the gay marriage debate

an article about Finnish snow and ice sculptures.. the included slide show is stunning. In a way, nothing beats beautiful temporary art.

a ditty about the web site idea-a-day.com, and the idea of ideas as entertainment. I like.

Cello disco, anyone? You’re not going to find it on iTunes Music Store (I looked…)

Musicians typically release one album at a time. Twelve or so songs, once per year at most.. usually more like every two years. While outside the studio, they tour to promote the current offering.

With MP3s, the notion of an album is only a holdover from the media of the past. Songs are the level of granularity we’re looking at today. So I predict that some artists will move to a model where they record a dozen songs at once in the studio and they release one song at a time, on a rolling schedule, until they get back into the studio. Tours would feature a rolling set list, which might add a song or two as they are released. The single would come out first, so the artist can perform it at all shows. While on the road, the artist could work out different arrangements for the songs (as naturally happens anyway), prehaps resulting in a remix or two. Song-level releases would keep the act continuously fresh for audiences and the artist alike.

Someone must be doing this already. Who is it?

(On the other hand, it breaks the continuity of an album. How would people react if “Dark Side of the Moon” were released one song at a time? No, thanks.)

From The NY Times Mag from last weekend, an interesting piece about copyright law in the 21st century. I’m glad to see this topic getting some real attention in the press, especially since the spin is heavily on the side of the Copy Left people, the Creative Commons, Larry Lessig, etc. Of course, producers and consumers are both vital to keeping the media industries alive, so a solution must balance the needs of both. That’s economics. What remains to be seen is how much further the noose will be tightened wrt. distribution, reuse, and redistribution. Can the Internet still save us?

This article doesn’t take packaging—one of the precious few physical manifestations of all this data—as seriously as consumers do. You’re not going to get packaging on the iTunes Music Store. We’ve gone from live performances (the most visceral option) to LP records (with big 10”x10” or so images) to CDs (much smaller) to little web pages about the music. I guess people put up with the transition to CDs, out of convenience, so maybe they’ll put up with no physical manifestation, out of convenience. But this just isn’t a complete musical experience, in my mind.

So I think packaging’s value is on the rise, at least during the transition period from CDs to downloaded MP3s. Maybe I’m just paying more attention to it, but aren’t companies are putting a lot more effort into their packaging these days?

A nice article about Rufus Wainwright, whose partying has gotten him into trouble lately… I await the new album he’s recently finished.

Daniel is going on tour with Josh Rouse soon, promoting Josh’s new record 1972. A pretty good disc, well put together. He has a nice voice. I’m particularly fond of the song “Flight Attendant,” a lonely song with a nice nostalgic/cinematic sound. I think a lot of Josh’s past success has been in movie soundtracks. On a side note, the flute seems to be whispering its way back into rock-n-roll. Or maybe it’s been there all along, and I just keep hearing it lately.

I listened to the audio version of E. Annie Proulx’s The Accordion Crimes on a car trip this weekend. It’s sort of an American version of The Red Violin that nicely covers immigration and American cultural history from the perspective of one green Italian accordion as it changes hands and brings a curse (and a little blessing) to its owners over a couple centuries.