Information Technology Reference
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be easier spread, evolved and enhanced in a globally shared environment. One of
these attempts of aligning humans natural ways of exchanging memes to work seam-
less within a partly non-human environment has been conducted by Yuzuru Tanaka
and his group at Meme Media Laboratory in Hokkaido University, Japan. Through
their work we were given the theoretical as well as numerous versions of the practical
creation of the meme media concept known by the name IntelligentPad [1] [2] [5] [6].
These were developed both by the meme media laboratory on their own but also in
cooperation with several partner companies of various size and status, like for exam-
ple Hitachi, Fujitsu and the latest implementation PlexWare from 2003 by K-Plex in
USA and Japan. No matter version or implementer the purpose of meme media was
always to work as smart collaborative containers of all forms of digital knowledge.
From that philosophy and research has now risen an evolved and extended web
based framework that allows every user to bring their ideas and knowledge to the
table in order to create a true federation of humanity's collected knowledge, that is in
constant progress and evolution. We have chosen to call this framework Webble
World [3] [7] [8].
The compound documents accumulated in such a world-wide repository may work
as genes to evolve their variety. They can be easily copied, which corresponds to the
self-replication of genes. Their reediting by people corresponds to the recombination
of genes. Some people may replace a component of a compound document with
another to find out an unexpected functional effect. This may correspond to a muta-
tion of a gene. Finally, Webbles are subject to people's evaluation; Some of them are
frequently copied and reused, while others are gradually forgotten. This corresponds
to the natural selection of genes.
A Webble as a Meme Media object, may contain more or less anything digitally
available. It can be developed by a programmer to look and behave in any way
imaginable within ordinary software development restrictions. When it has been dep-
loyed to the web it can be downloaded by any Internet user together with other Web-
bles directly in the browser and combined together to form new compound Webbles,
also known as Webble Widgets, which the user can configure so that they may solve
some tasks, or present some content the user wants to share. Further on, such com-
pound Webbles can be additionally combined as a set of tools and/or interactive
content presentation devices in order to form Webble applications. When satisfied the
user can republish the creation to the web and then be found by other users who may
use the Webbles either as they were intended or further improve and reedit with new
features and new content. Through its reuse by other users the original Webble
evolves step by step every time it gets republished, though previous versions original-
ly developed by someone else are still accessible and are not removed or altered. This
does not protect the Webbles of the past from the laws of evolution though, since
Webbles with high usability rating and popularity will be found more easily and in
greater numbers than those that are no longer in favor of the users and which will sink
down into the layers of human productivity and finally be no more than an historical
fact. It makes the Internet a true living and organic community where everyone parti-
cipates and quite complex software application development can be done online di-
rectly in the browser together with the entire world.
