David Burbridge continues his series with Cultural Evolution.  Today he examines memetic evolution in and of itself, not as a by-product of human evolution.  This is the way cultural phenomena like religion are best understood - as self-replicating memes which compete with other memes for reproductive survival.  Excellent stuff!

Mark Cary considers Technorati as a Reputation System.  This is highly relevant to yesterday's Google and Blogs thoughts; as well as the discussions about the relevance of metadata.  Emergent data like analysis of inbound links are the best way to categorize information, as Google understands.  Really good - read it!

Dave Sifry, who created Technorati as a "hobby", has announced an API.  This means anyone can create facilities based on their link database...  hmmm....  I'm an anyone.  Stay tuned!

{ By the way, if your eyes glaze over when you read stuff like this, Tim Bray wrote an excellent introduction to web APIs... }

Want to see something cool?  Here is the "deepest" deep-space photo ever taken.  (click for larger image.)  The faintest stars visible in this picture are 6 billion times fainter than can be seen with the naked eye. [ via Boing Boing ]

Tonight I sent out over 60 invitations to join LinkedIn.  You don't get anything out of this kind of network unless you put something in.  If you were invited, please join and check it out.  If you weren't and you want to be, send me email :)

Here is a great discussion about LinkedIn on Joi Ito's blog.  Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn's founder) is among the participants in the discussion.

If you don't think the U.S. needs tort reform, check this out: Lawsuit Seeks to Ban Sale of Oreos to Children.  I am not making this up.  This is pathetic.  I honestly believe civil law is the biggest weakness in the U.S. politico-economic system.  { And just try fighting a patent suit sometime - even if you're dead right, you could be dead before you can prove you're right. }