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concept of memes introduced by Richard Dawkins in his “Selfish Gene” [11]. He
pointed out the similarity between biological evolution and cultural evolution. Ideas,
for example, are replicated for reuse by other people, recombined to generate a new
idea, transferred with some errors replacing some portions of the originals, and finally
evaluated by some community to survive or disappear. These correspond to the
replication, recombination, mutation, and natural selection of genes in biological
evolution. Therefore he coined a new word “memes” to denote a cultural counterpart
of genes, i.e., imaginary units for carrying information or knowledge, by combining
“gene” and “mimesis”. While memes are imaginary vehicles of information and
knowledge, meme media are real vehicles carrying externalized information and
knowledge. The meme media concept was first proposed with its live demonstration
in May 1993 at TED (Technology Entertainment and Design) Conference held in
Kobe. This was the first TED held outside US. Meme media requires not only
component-based media architecture but also a world-wide repository of composite
pads to and from which people can publish and retrieve composite pads. We named
such a repository “meme pool” [12].
Since our proposal of meme media was earlier than the release of Mosaic ver. 1.0
Web browser in November 1993, we developed a meme pool called “piazza”
independently from the later Web technologies (Figure 8). After the rapid increase of
Web users, however, this independence from the Web technologies brought in a
serious problem of how to migrate Web resources as well as users' legacy local
resources into a meme media system environment. We also realized that it is much
easier to develop a meme pool system based on Web technologies [12].
Our first attempt was to use Mosaic browser to embed any composite pad in an
HTML Web page
(Figure 9). The embedding was done by using a special file type to
recognize a file of a composite pad for automatically downloading its save format
representation and converting it to a composite pad. This composite pad is put on the
HTML Web page at a specified location as a floating object which is not actually
embedded in this HTML document but moves on this page in synchronization with
the page scroll as if it is embedded in the page. The HTML document reserves an
empty space on which this pad can sit.
Fig. 8. Piazza working as a meme pool of pads
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