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Memes, memes, everywhere memes

Before launching Parentography, I wasn’t very familiar with the subculture of blogs.  I’ve learned a lot since then and one thing I’ve learned is that there are a lot of new words you have to learn if you want to be a savvy blogger - words like trackback, plug-ins, moblogs, and, my favorite, memes.  This last one took me a while to figure out; the first few times I read it, I ignored it.  But, it just kept appearing, so I figured it must be important.  I consulted Wikipedia and learned that a meme is:

a neologism that first appeared in the 1976 book by Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene. Though Dawkins defined the meme as “a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation,” memeticists vary in their definitions of meme. The lack of a consistent, rigorous and precise definition of a meme remains one of the principal criticisms leveled at memetics, the study of memes.

That helped a little, but digging deeper, I found this definition provided by Fredscapes 0.1 that relates specifically to blogs:

[a meme is] an idea, project, statement or even a question that is posted by one blog and responded to by other blogs. Although the term encompasses much of the natural flow of communication in the Blogosphere, there are active bloggers and blog sites that are dedicated to the creation of memes on a regular basis.

I’m not sure how one blog responds to another — I thought it was bloggers who controlled the software, not the other way around, but I now finally understand the concept.  I’ll be curious to see if ‘meme’ makes its way into more common usage.

Isn’t there a service out there that lets you track the emergence and growth of word usage?