Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id LAA10664 (8.6.9/5.3[ref pg@gmsl.co.uk] for cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk from fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk); Thu, 28 Mar 2002 11:26:20 GMT Date: Thu, 28 Mar 2002 03:21:51 -0800 From: "Douglas P. Wilson" <dp-wilson@shaw.ca> Subject: MemeticsFlowers.Org and mailing list To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk Message-id: <010301c1d64a$c2dbe740$856c4518@no.shawcable.net> X-MIMEOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.00.3018.1300 X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 5.00.3018.1300 Content-type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT X-Priority: 3 X-MSMail-priority: Normal Sender: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
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. This site
and mailing list are intended to support the creation of software for
rapidly creating web pages and a mailing list to propagate ideas and other
memes, meme-complexes, or memetic organisms.
If you can produce a two word description or name for an idea you want to
propagate, like Social Technology, memetic propagation software (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.
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.
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
===============================================================
This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the
Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission
For information about the journal and the list (e.g. unsubscribing)
see: http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit
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