DavidV Posted March 25, 2006 Report Share Posted March 25, 2006 A meme is a recent concept that refers to how certain ideas are better at self-propagating because they are more “catchy” than others. Examples of memes are advertising slogans, chain letters, popular mini-sites with absurd content ( “all your base are belong to us”, “dancing baby” and “hamster dance”), and religion, which is probably the most effective meme in history. I would like to try an experiment at using the community of ObjectivismOnline to help spread positive memes about Objectivism and capitalism. The process is simple: we use this site to share meme-seeds, and collaborate on promoting it to give it the initial push. This method has been proven to work for a variety of other groups – see miserable failure. The seed idea should be short and catchy, and oriented to a wide audience rather any one site or exchange. The primary tools at our disposal are blogs and social news sites, like Digg.com and Del.ico.us (Let’s create a list of others such sites we find effective.) Here is an example of a recent meme-seed: I wrote a blog post and submitted a short post to Slashdot about the retarding effect of regulation on innovation. The story has 264 comments, which probably means that many thousands of people saw it. If just 10 blogs posted on it, it might start a chain reaction that would expose an idea to hundreds of thousands. Beyond the motivation of having a positive influence on culture, this project has a more immediate selfish benefit: your blog will have the potential to attract visitors from everyone in the chain of attribution of your idea. To be more precise, here is the process I am thinking of: You write a short blog post or make a mini-site about an idea which you think is a good candidate. You post a link to that post here. Participants (a.) link to you with a summary of your idea and (b.) submit your idea to social news site s(like digg.com and Slashdot) Profit! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
softwareNerd Posted March 25, 2006 Report Share Posted March 25, 2006 An interesting idea. So, the two things we need to get going are: A list of other sites where the meme could be "propogated" A list of catchy memes Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Proverb Posted March 26, 2006 Report Share Posted March 26, 2006 This is what I came up with right off the top of my head. I would post the attached file conspicuously in some article about the fallacies behind 'public' property. You know we could also find a way to put together some compelling 'popular' internet video that we could post on YouTube.com. If we could come up with the right 'flavor' as it were, we could generate alot of traffic internet.bmp Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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