I decided early on to put together an Oscars pool for my new co-workers. Most of them are serious cinematics. So I picked a dozen categories and went in search of a Web 2.0 solution for running the pool. Googling “office pool” brought me piles of links to betting sites. There seemed to be several sites hardwired for NFL weekly pools. But I had a really tough time finding a service that would give me some flexibility to do something besides a sports pool.

Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us

Tell me this isn’t awesome. You really need to spend more time on YouTube

Not me. I’m barely in corporate America to begin with. My past and current are packed with tech start-ups, entrepreneurial self-ventures, non-profit, and for-profit but for-service small companies. I haven’t worked for a company as big as 3000 employees since my first job out of school.

For those of you who think that the far-out ideas in politics come only from California, I submit Initiative 957 from the great state of Washington…

Proponents of same-sex marriages have heard for years from the conservative right, that gay marriages make no sense, because marriage exists solely for the purpose of procreation. So, in a put-up-or-shut-up move, the Washington Defense of Marriage Alliance puts forth Initiative 957 that would make it law that those wishing to marry must prove they have the ability to procreate (I’m guessing biological proof of fertility, not an actual demonstration of knowledge of proper technique). Further, should any marriage actually fail to produce progeny after a period of 3 years, that marriage would be “unrecognized”. You can read a bit more here, here and here.

I never really got into the Second Life thing. I went there, I tried on a body, walked into a few trees. But the time it takes to learn how to have sex was evidently beyond my attention span so I didn’t go back (And that’s different than my First Life how?). ANYWAY, the virtual world has been getting a bunch of attention lately, including cover status on the current issue of Inc. Magazine. With folks like IBM saying they plan to drop $10 million into establishing a presence there and other companies setting up shop it seems to have reached the tipping point corporate-wise. And perhaps for its personal users too, as their number reportedly doubled in just the last few months.