The Memeosphere?

I’ve used the term meme for years but this morning is the first time I recall seeing memeosphere. A meme is a contagious idea, so the memeosphere is the universe of popular memes, e.g. top-ranked posts to Del.icio.us, FlickR, etc. The memeosphere is thus the internet’s version of pop culture. Popurls displays links to stories, photos, and videos from Slash, Digg, YouTube, Furl, Spurl, and others on a single page. The design of the page is brilliant.

Last night I started reading Scientific American’s special issue, A Matter of Time. Some scientists deny that time flows. For them, the past, present, and future all exist forever; what changes is the observer, not the observed.
Consider what now means. Mars is twenty light-minutes from Earth. If a robot moves on the surface of Mars, I see it change position twenty minutes later. When is now? If time is real, why can’t I answer how long a second is?

Some scientists say you can track the direction of time by the messiness of matter, that is, entropy. If the state of the world is more chaotic, that means it’s later rather than sooner. I’m not a theoretical physicist. The metaphor of the flow of time has me in its grip. I can’t wrap my head around the concept of all time existing at once.

That’s why visiting Popurls feels to me like I’m dipping into the flow of what’s happening. It will be fun to watch day-to-day changes in what’s hot and what’s not.