Speaking of sci-fi authors, Automattic is hosting Neal Stephenson for a livestream about his new book soon, please tune in!

Neal was a big influence on WordPress! I got hip to him from Tantek. In the source code of billions of pages you’ll see this:

<link rel="profile" href="https://gmpg.org/xfn/11">

GMPG is the Global Media Protocols Group, “an experiment in Metamemetics.” Inspired, of course, by the Global Multimedia Protocol Group that owned the virtual real estate in Snow Crash’s metaverse.

Eric, Tantek, and I were reacting to the idea that there should be a separate heavily-marked-up RDF or XML web, and that HTML couldn’t be extended or enriched with metadata in a way that was beautiful to both humans and machines. It was really an aesthetic war. (It later got more built out in Microformats.)

We should revisit some of those principles because the web could use more distribution right now.