Sunshocked

It was not poor planning, but rather mutual ignorance, that led to the simultaneous scheduling of the Commonwealth Club’s lecture by Geoff Nunberg and the smartMeme reportback on the STORY project. Only because they offered such a chance to rub elbows with intelligent people did I break a sweat running through the streets in order to attend both. I’m glad I did. I don’t think anyone else noticed that the two were talking about exactly the same things.

Just the other day, I was having a discussion with a friend over whether she was anti-capitalist or post-capitalist. The latest issue of Adbusters comes to the rescue with a feature by Peter Barnes, author of Capitalism 3.0: A Guide to Reclaiming the Commons. His use of a software metaphor for a social institution had me at hello.

You may have already heard of Snakes on a Plane, a movie coming out today about one plane and more than one snake. It’s prevalence in the blogosphere has been oft noted by mainstream media. But why? What has caused blogs everywhere to embrace it knowing literally no more than the title and the star?

Last week I fell in love with XFN, a microformat for representing human relationships. I immediately started sketching out fun ways to make it work for me. First stop, my Mac’s Addressbook.