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The Web is obsessed with anything that spreads, whether it's a virus, a blog or a rumor. And so the Internet loves memes.

Richard Dawkins coined the term meme in his 1976 book, "The Selfish Gene." Memes (the word rhymes with dreams and is short for mimemes, from the word mimetic) are infectious ideas or any other things that spread by imitation from person to person - a jingle, a joke, a fashion, the smiley face or the concept of hell. Memes propagate from brain to brain much as genes spread from body to body. Thus, Mr. Dawkins wrote, they really "should be regarded as living structures, not just metaphorically but technically."

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