Loosely used on the ‘Net (especially in the Blogsphere), a meme is a sort of zeitgeist, something/someone with that intangible buzz. At least that’s how I’m going to refer to memes in this entry.

Today, some obvious memes are Google and the act I’m performing right now – blogging.

But – for reasons best left unwritten (not because I’m hiding anything, but the reasons are…meaningless and pretty darn boring – I’m been thinking about memes lately.

Mainly, I was thinking about memes of the past – things like that.

Expired Memes:

• Zdnet: Remember Zdnet? Next to C|Net’s news.com, it was my favorite tech news site for a few years. And then C|Net bought it. And it’s been going downhill ever since – a couple of good columnists left, but not much else. And it really doesn’t differentiate itself from news.com, so what’s the purpose? (Yeah, ad dollars..)
• Jon Katz: Love him or hate him, he has pretty much evaporated ever since he left/was cut from Wired.com – but he was relevant in some fashion for a while. Hell, Slashdot even has preference where you can suppress Jon Katz stories. While newbies probably never heard of him, Katz was a strong voice for some of the Web’s seminal years.
• Browser Wars: Remember the browser wars? Sure you do… There are actually a new set of browser wars going on, this time not for installed base, but for standards support. It’s not in the regular media much because the fight is different: In the first browser war, MS wanted to own the browser to control the desktop. That didn’t really work out the way anyone thought it would. Today, the browser war is standards bodies and developers crying for standards…and MS doesn’t much care. How does that help them?
• Netscape: Do I really need to comment?
• Content is King: While I think the pendulum will, to a degree, swing back to this meme, right now it’s more flash (literally – Macromedia’s Flash) than substance.
• Webmonkey: Remember when Webmonkey was relevant? A daily must-read? No more. Very sad.

Today’s Memes:

• Google: While the Google backlash is certainly building and has been noted here, Google is still to search engines what Windows is to OSes – except most consider Google the best engine, while Mac and Linux/*nix users will – and can – present strong arguments for their choices.
• Blogs: Again, there is a backlash in the works here – and the whole divisive nature of many eminent bloggers/blog tool makers has damaged adoption – but blogs have filled several important voids for many authors and readers:
  

  • Unbiased voices – single voices making a difference
  • Additional data – for reporters such as Dan Gillmor, blogs offer a way to supplement their stories, publish additional information that would never make it into dead tree publications (for many reasons). This cannot be a bad thing: Hey, don’t care about this extra stuff? Fine. It does not interfere with your print reading and so on. But it’s there if you care.
  • Publication ease – I’ve always maintained that the Internet’s killer app is not the Web, but e-mail. In the same way, blogging – for all its benefits – is (in my mind) most powerful as a simple way for anyone to publish. Sure, MS FrontPage is pretty easy and all that, but one still needs a domain (what’s a domain?), has to sorta understand FTP and so on. Fuggetaboutit. With some blog tools/services, all you need to know is how to use a browser and type. THAT’S damn powerful.
  • New life to the Home Page of yesterday: Today’s blog is yesterday’s My Home Page, to a large degree.

• Wireless: Not a strong meme, but certainly one that is almost past meme because it’s been adopted so widely. Hell, it’s expected nowadays at tech conferences, and this will bleed over to regular conferences and other areas. Wireless is a stealth meme because there are so few reasons to fight against it. One may consider, for example, a tablet PC to be either an oversized Palm or a crippled laptop. OK. But the argument against wireless is probably only one of two: 1) protocol issues (a, b, g…), or 2) Security (hard-wired more secure than wireless, in general. Beyond that, wireless is a good thing. And these arguments are not Windoze vs. Linux issues. These arguments are for specific instances and are can be easily reconciled.
• *nix: Linux is a meme in itself, but its also part of a larger meme, which can either be described as a Windoze backlash (in this case, not necessarily a knee-jerk reaction) or as a real trend: People are looking for a stable OS. With hardware becoming a commodity and increasingly powerful, OS software is becoming more interesting to folks. And Linux (stable, cheap, hard) is earning a lot of attention, as is Apple’s OS X – a BSD variant with a solid GUI slapped on top of it. While I run Windows, and will until it’s unnecessary (necesary now because most others do – vox populi standards compliance), I like the concept of Apples OS X – runs the Windows-type programs I need (MS Office, Photoshop) plus has the command-line interface that so many hate but I love. I’m always amazed that all the Linux talk and KDE vs. Gnome GUI flames take place without the explicit declaration that Apple has done what GNU/Linux community (Lindows, Wine…) has been trying to do for years: Rock solid OS with *nix underpinning that has a stable, attractive GUI and runs software people know and love – not just GIMP.