Jerry pointed me to the Principia Cybernetica Web, specifically to the section on Memes.

What's a "meme", you ask, if you didn't already know?

Meme: an information pattern, held in an individual's memory, which is capable of being copied to another individual's memory.

I first read about memes in Richard Dawkins' excellent book, The Selfish Gene. It was near the end, and honestly, I thought the idea was dumb. It seemed far too amorphous and unwieldy to apply such a term to concepts as dissimilar as the song "Row, Row, Row Your Boat" and Orthodox Judaism.

But the term has stuck, and now it's in fairly wide use (at least among muckety-muck academics). I don't know...I'd be curious to know how many of you out there were familiar with the term...

Anyway, the site looks fairly interesting, so have a poke around and let me know what you think.