Two Emerging Memes: Freenomics and Crowdsourcing

Silicon Valley has always been fascinated by new technology memes, radical new ideas and business models that take off and capture the popular imagination - often changing the world of technology in the process. Valley memes quickly become the jargon of leading-edge VCs. For example, the phrase "it's a Freemium model, based on UGC and Wisdom of Crowds" requires no explanation in certain circles; it's as meaningful to these players as the phrase "it's a RESTful Web Service based on a 3-tier J2EE architecture" is to a Web Applications Architect.

(For the uninitiated: Freemium is a term popularized by VC Fred Wilson to mean a free service with an upsell to paid premium subscriptions; UGC stands for User-generated content, a relatively new concept in which the audience or readership helps to craft creative or original content; and Wisdom of Crowds is a term popularized by James Surowiecki's book of the same name.)

How does a technology meme start? When does an interesting new idea or concept tip over into a meme?