Exceedingly Mundane

OK, it occured to me that most of you won’t know what a meme is. After all, a couple of weeks ago I had never heard of one. Then I got on my blogging obsession and ran across them and quickly became enamored of memes and websites that post daily or weekly meme questions.

BTW, I *think* it’s pronouned meeeme, as in rhymes with dream. 🙂

Here’s a technical definition of meme from a website:

As defined by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene (1976): “a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation.” “Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation.”
www.silcom.com/~barnowl/chain-letter/glossary.htm

And here’s a definition of a meme, as it relates to a blog (short for web log):

Definition: In the world of blogs and bloggers, a meme is an idea, question, statement or project that is posted in one blog and answered to in many other blogs. Memes are used to propagate ideas in the blogosphere. Some blogs or web sites post memes on a daily, weekly, fortnightly or monthly basis.

Does that help? 😀