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« Secretary of Education fact-checked | Main | PowerPoint revisited » Wednesday, November 29, 2006The speed of internet lightA blog called Acephalous, written by Scott Eric Kaufman, is running a neat little experiment. How fast, Kaufman wonders, does a "meme" travel across the Internet -- or really the blogosphere, though he seems not to recognize the distinction. A meme, for anyone who hasn't hooked into the meme that propagated this word, is in this usage some cultural artifact -- a word, a band, a trend of some sort -- that is transmitted by repetition to other people in the manner of a biological process like the transmission of genes. Kaufman's experiment has a certain pleasing simplicity because it's what you might call pure meme; there's no content to it. It just says link back to here, and explain the concept. And in that way pass it on. He's tracking the results in ten-minute intervals, and I look forward to the report. Posted by Evan Hughes at 02:15 PM
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