[Sigia-l] Librarians and the Memetic Web

[Bob Doyle]

Hi all,

Imagine that we had a way of simply tagging meaning in web pages. We 
could call the units of meaning "memes" to borrow Richard Dawkins' 
analogy that ideas evolve just like our genes.

And we could give each meme a globally unique identifier - its pseudo 
DNA, the virtual analog of the new RFID that promises someday to 
identify every physical object on the planet.

How would we locate the memes? We would need a sort of Union Catalog of 
memes, but without the classifying and cataloging skills of librarians 
this might be an impossible task.

It can only be accomplished by distributing most of the work to those 
with a vital interest in a meme.

Mapping and linking the memes we call memography. Finding the memes is 
almost unbelievably easy and produces the librarian's holy grail - near 
perfect precision and recall - using nothing but today's full-text 
search engines!

Creating your own memes is really easy.
1) Create a globally unique meme ID.
2) Paste the meme ID into your web pages
3) Wait a bit for the search engines to crawl your site, then use the 
meme ID to search for your tagged pages with 100% precision and recall 
(until someones spams your meme ID, a problem that we think is quite 
solvable compared to email spam).

More details on the above at http://www.memography.org

Because we are adding meaning (semantics), we immodestly call our effort 
the Memetic Web after the much more powerful Semantic Web.

Join the discussion at http://www.memeticweb.org.

I was inspired to create the memetic web in response to the future of 
findability described in Peter Morville's marvelous new book - Ambient 
Findability.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0596007655/findability-20/

This is the most important book you can read about your future. It 
certainly changed my life.

Peter publicly announced the memetic web project yesterday:
http://www.findability.org/archives/000068.php

-- 
Bob Doyle
Editor In Chief, CMS Review - http://www.cmsreview.com
Technology Adviser, CM Pros - http://www.cmprofessionals.org
Contributing Editor, EContent Magazine - 
http://www.econtentmag.com/About/AboutAuthor.aspx?AuthorID=155
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