From: Douglas P. Wilson (dp-wilson@shaw.ca)
Date: Thu Mar 28 2002 - 19:16:06 MST
The new domain name MemeticFlowers.Org has been registered and a temporary
home page for it has been created at
www.SocialTechnology.Org/MemeticFlowers.html with a mailing list at :
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/MemeticFlowers.
As ordinary flowers are the reproductive or sex organs of angiosperm plants,
memetic flowers are reproductive organs for memetic organisms, e.g. the
virus this mailing list is about.
The new MemeticFlowers site and mailing list are intended to support the
creation of software that can do something to help spread ideas, e.g.
software for rapidly creating web pages and also for creating and
maintaining mailing lists which will support communication amongst
participants helping to propagate ideas and other memes, meme-complexes, or
memetic organisms.
For example, if you can produce a two word description or name for an idea
you want to propagate, like Social Technology, or Memetic Flower, some of
this memetic propagation software (itself a kind of Memetic Flower) should
be able to create a web page, perhaps with a name consisting of the
concatenated words, like www.SocialTechnology.Org containing a lot of
standard default pieces of mechanism like guest books, together with a
mailing list for participants, all in support of that idea, and it could do
so in seconds.
The site and mailing list will also support discussion of the fundamental
idea of Memetic Flowers, which is much broader than this message suggests.
Here is the description paragraph for the MemeticFlowers mailing list (see
subscription form at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/MemeticFlowers), slightly
reformatted: --
Www.MemeticFlowers.Org, is an organisation and website for the creation and
application of open-source software and HTML templates for use in setting up
websites which may be attractive reproductive organs for memetic organisms.
The corresponding dotcom name, MemeticFlowers.Com has been registered, but
is not being used -- ideas for constructive use of that domain name would be
welcomed -- send them to dp-wilson@shaw.ca or post them to the mailing list.
This website and the Memetic Flowers mailing list will also be used for
theoretical and pragmatic discussions of memetic flowers, so long as
excessive discussion does not interfere with the actual software development
work to be done. If that happens the discussion will be moved elsewhere.
Flowers, of course, are the reproductive organs of angiosperm plants, and
this word can be used by analogy to mean the reproductive organs of
meme-complexes or memetic organisms.
Memes, of course, are the information or software analogues of genes, as
first described by Richard Dawkins in his excellent book The Selfish Gene.
This is the same analogy that exists between computer viruses and ordinary
genetic viruses such as the AIDS or common cold viruses.
We could surely find a less poetic but probably more accurate name for
memetic flowers, but to do so would be to ignore the reproductive potential
of catchy names.
A sister site with a related idea which links to MemeticFlowers.Org is
www.GradStudentProjects.Org.
dpw
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