This Guardian interview with George Lakoff beautifully sums up most of the content of “Don’t Think of an Elephant” theguardian.com/sustainable-business/george-lakoff-green-marketing — read it then go buy the book!

Reading Lakoff+Johnson on time metaphors, wondering if the way we use the two main inconsistent metaphors (time as objects passing by a stationary observer vs time as a landscape through which an observer passes) has personality side effects, as one is a metaphor where the observer is helpless, whereas in the other the observer is in control.

Thoughts about #microformats 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.

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