My pal Alec Saunders posted something this morning that merits attention on two fronts, I think.

Creating a Meme

Last night I gave a talk at the inaugural Ottawa CaseCamp on blogging and the impact it can have on your business.  Meme creation is one of the biggies, which I didn’t dwell on, but deserves some amplification.

Wikipedia defines a meme as a ”unit of cultural information transferable from one mind to another”.  By definition, the world of blogs is the world of meme creation, and propogation.  Whether marketers, political pundits, analysts, sports commentators, or politicians, that’s one of the reasons we write blogs.

It’s been a little over a year since I set out to create a new meme to talk about the telecommunications industry.  I called it Voice 2.0, and without going into a lot of detail about what Voice 2.0 is (there’s plenty to read on that), I want to tell you a little about the success of that meme.

I wrote the Voice 2.0 Manifesto on a train from Toronto to Ottawa.  It was the product of a bunch of ideas about how to overcome roadblocks that had the potential to prevent iotum from being successful in the industry.  They had been percolating in my head for weeks, and now I wanted to get them out and into writing.  When I returned, I posted them on the iotum Simpy Relevant blog, cross posted them on the Saunders Log and then sent email to a few of my blogging friends inviting them to talk about these ideas.

First, on memes. They're an interesting concept, that like many people, I struggled with for a time. For those of us been online ever since Noah left the Ark and plugged his laptop in to an RJ-45 outlet, we've carried out online conversations. We had bulletin boards. Then we had email. We had usenet. We even replicated bulletin boards on the web. The threaded conversation goes back a long way in time. Written letters, dating back hundreds of years, back and forth between friends, still presented a threaded conversation.

It takes a bit of diong to overcome the threaded conversation mindset. The web, in particular blogs and wikis, changed that. In the blogosphere of today, conversations are both asymmetric and asynchronous. In that regard, a meme is a theme. It's not a thread of conversation, but rather a swatch of cloth, all the threads woven together. It's the power of individuals talking about the same or related subjects, but not necessarily with one another directly. The theme becomes a tapestry of sorts, wih different hues and colors as different interests contribute new ideas. I think Wikipedia's definition, as Alec quoted, is far too narrow.

A meme is a tapestry. If you prefer a musical analogy, a meme is a symphony. Sometimes the notes are in harmony. Sometimes they're discordant. But the underlying melody follows through the entire symphony as each instrumental section contributes their part.

A meme is a variation on what we might call a "living document," Alec laid the first substantive threads to one such compelling meme with his Voice 2.0 paper that grew to become an important meme within telecommunications. Many of us have added pieces along the way. The underlying thread of Voice 2.0 crosses many boundaries. I added another piece with The Future - Some Thoughts on Voice 2.0 - Presence, Availability, and putting the pieces together .

My piece generated a comment that I want to share and excerpt from - "As you said, the subject is vast, the applications pervasive. I believe your post scratches only a small part of the "tip of the iceberg", still vey much "phone" driven (sorry;). "

There's lots of talk about Web 2.0, and what it means. Alec closed with this -

In 12 months time, we’ve managed to insert an idea, which now has
apparently a ton of currency, into a very old industry.  We haven’t
relied on large marketing budgets, or heavy lifting PR campaigns. 
Instead, using just blogs and conversation, we set out to cause a
change that would produce an environment that would be more conducive
to our success, and the success of hosts of other companies like ours. 

And that, my friends, is why blogging is powerful.

But for me, the idea of buiding a meme, thread at a time into something more. Blogging is powerful, but only because it weaves the threads of conversations into larger tapestries. This particular tapestry is still emerging. It's vast and complex. And we'll see where it takes us.


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