Meme tracker

Before coining the term "hubject", I just made sure it was brand new, at least on the Web. All I got ten days ago with this query was some background noise due mainly to mispellings of "subject". Today you get a few hits, but if I judge by the very positive feedback I got so far it should spread. Before the public launch, I had pushed the term to Jack, and he sent me this page by Jon Udell on the O'Reilly Network, pointing to the final comment.

One of the advantages of coining a word is that you can track the progress of its associated meme. Last fall, in collaboration with readers of my blog, I settled on the word screencast. A couple of months ago it drew 200 Google hits, today the number is 60,000. Screencasting may never have the mainstream appeal of podcasting, a word coined not long before that now draws 8 million Google hits. But the meme is spreading and I can't wait to see where it goes next.

I can't wait either to see where hubjects go next, so I set this post as a permanent meme tracker. But so far, I can easily track myself the meme expansion. The last one to-date is freshly posted by Danny Ayers as Stuff of the Day, just after a quick mail "intercourse" triggered by Jack. Before that, I had a fruitful exchange with Patrick Durusau and Steve Newcomb, from which it appears that hubjects could be considered as no more no less than possible technical implementations of the "subject proxies" defined by the TMRM. Steve is even considering the introduction of hubjects in his Versavant implementation. Got also very positive feedback from Phil Tetlow, coordinator of the W3C SWBPD Software Engineering Task Force, already mentioned in those pages. More to come ...