In case you’re wondering where I am at the moment: I’ve been in Quebec City for a few days now, and spent a very interesting night at (what I’m pretty sure is) Canada’s only ice hotel. It got a little chilly around 6 a.m., but I survived — and it was an amazing experience that I’d definitely recommend.

Quebec City is absolutely beautiful and a must-see for anyone who lives in Canada or is visiting Canada. I’ve taken lots of pictures, and I’ll try to get some up here on the site in a non-down-to-business related post.

I’m off to check out Quebec’s museum of fine arts tomorrow, and enjoy some more great Quebecois food (although I don’t think it will beat the unbelievable Moroccan meal that I had tonight).

I ended up seeing an exhibit today at the Quebec museum of civilization that really made me think about where we’re headed with connectivity/connectedness and the web in general, especially in urban environments. But more about that when I’m back to non-holiday mode.

In response to my post about the Burger King meme, Stephanie suggested that perhaps the Burger King king wasn’t really a meme at all. In that particular case, she asked: what’s the difference between a meme and a simple marketing gimmick?

Here is the definition of a meme according to Richard Dawkins (author of both The Selfish Gene and The God Delusion, along with many other books), the guy who actually coined the term (as paraphrased by the Journal of Memetics):

The word “meme” refers to “a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation”. More precisely, a meme can be defined as an information pattern, held in an individual’s memory or in an outside artefact (e.g. book, record or tool), which is likely to be communicated or copied to another individual’s memory. Examples of memes are ideas, technologies, theories, songs, fashions, and traditions. This covers all forms of beliefs, values and behaviors that are normally taken over from others rather than discovered independently.

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It seems like everybody under the sun is putting together a wiki for something. There’s even a wiki for the board game Go. But with all these wikis around, is a wiki always the best tool for the job?

Back in September of last year, I talked about some general questions people should ask before setting up a wiki. The very first question I asked was: “is a wiki the best technology for what I am seeking to accomplish?”. That may not always be an easy question to answer.

So if you’re thinking of setting up a collaborative space — when should you use a forum and when should you use a wiki?

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I’ve been interested in memes (especially web memes) for quite a while, and I’ve wanted a place to post my thoughts on the subject — so I’ve created memetiks.com! The new site is “about memes, knowledge management and how we learn, interact and innovate through exchanging information, with a particular focus on how information and knowledge transform as they move from person to person.

Since technology also plays a big part in how these transformations happen, the internet is a popular topic as well — including the transitive communities that form, coalesce and dissolve in both the real world and online world, and how, when and why those two worlds intersect.”

While memetiks has started out with a few of my own thoughts on memes and how they affect us, I’m hoping that eventually, I can publish other short posts about memes — so if you have a post (or even an idea for a post) that you’d like to discuss, drop me a line using the contact form here or at memetiks.com (by the way, you can also subscribe to the memetiks feed).

Birth and early life: Born sometime in 1955. The King could often be found making balloon animals and doing magic tricks inside (or sometimes in the parking lot of) your local Burger King. The King was also clean-shaven in the 1950s, 60s and 70s, having not yet grown his now-legendary beard.

Rebirth: Was reborn sometime in 2003 when Crispin Porter + Bugowsky, an advertising agency whose clients include not only Burger King, but also Coca-Cola, Volkswagen, Domino’s and Virgin Atlantic Airways, came up with the King when they found an oversized Burger King mask for sale on eBay.

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