1. Thoughts about whilst reading Lakoff’s Women, Fire and Dangerous Things — mf vocabularies e.g. h-card, h-entry, h-event are basic-level categories, the level at which:

    • it is easiest for humans to learn and reason about,
    • we have the shortest, most common names for them,
    • defined by how we interact with them

    E.g. h-entry ≈ “post”

    • short name
    • extremely common on the web
    • well-defined interaction patterns e.g. writing, posting, replying, reading, browsing through a feed, searching for/within, liking, reposting, quoting etc.

    Rather than RDF or schema.org which seek to create pure, objectivist, hierarchies of categories — our brains simply don’t work like that.

  2. @robinmujician Interesting — I’ve always considered a meme to be an idea transmitted between people, and memetics the study of how ideas travel between people. The argument being that uncommunicated thoughts aren’t very meaningful to anyone except the thinker, and the physical expressions of memes are creative works in their own right rather than memes — the meme being the idea that the creative work transmits.

    Never really considered it as applying to behaviours but it makes a lot of sense, and is in the official definition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme

  3. Love this recognition+analysis of a pattern:

    Metavirus: […] a particularly infectious kind of meme that is a metameme that rewrites your notions of previous ideas (memes) in terms of itself.

    Tantek on #indiewebcamp
  4. dConstruct was rather an emotional rollercoaster this year. Outstanding talks by all the speakers.

    I used to believe that conferences weren’t really about the speakers, but more the networking. That changed today, and with this knowledge I plan to change how I consume future dConstructs and other conferences of a similar ilk (are there any?).

    I need to spend the breaks between talks reflecting on the subject matter instead of randomly mingling with people. Whether it’d be more effective to do so alone or with others who wish to take a similar approach (anyone?) is down to experimentation.