Ashton Kutcher: Luckiest guy on the planet ? or Satan's tool?. I am now firmly convinced that actor Ashton Kutcher, as a boy,sold his soul to the devil to avoid spending even one more day sweeping Cheerios dust from the floor of a General Mills plant in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. How else to explain the 6-foot-3 transplanted Hawkeye's great good luck... [TV Barn]

A very enjoyable article, hitting all cylinders, discussing how the publicity machine was used to demonstrate to Hollywood that Demi was back. The fact that she chose a 25 year old to help announce this, permitting every media outlet to breathlessly 'report' on it, makes for a deliciously fun read.  9:57:55 AM    

Hydra and Social Invention. One of the moments I love best is when a group, given a piece of software, uses it in a way that is simultaneously so novel and so good that the pattern becomes worth codifying. This is now happening with Hydra, the "7 brains are smarter than one" text editor that has been likened to an IM Wiki. (Mac only, alas.)

At OSCON in Portland (at which I am not, alas), the soi-disant Semi-Unofficial OSCON Wiki is hosting a Hydra template for group note-taking, using the pattern that grew spontaneously at ETCon and was codified by Tom "The Internet is not Shit" Coates. And though the original Hydra use case was programmers collaborating remotely, the Hydra site itself now points to a similar template for the Apple WWDC, meaning that the software designers have taken note of the user innovation.

Watch for later releases of Hydra to include features designed specifically for real-time note-taking by the Wifi-tribe. I haven't talked to the Hydra designers, but I'm willing to bet that this will become an example of social innovation that gets instantiated in code. [Corante: Social Software]

Hydra is the sort of seminal tool that can only exist once the underlying technologies become trivial to carry out. It is the sort of tool that is impossible on Windonws and demonstrates the power of the Mac. It is a wonder that Apple has not bought out the company that developed it. This would be a better solution than doing something like making its own version. In the future, we all will use something like Hydra in collaborative environements.  10:49:49 AM