Today’s FT has a piece on the Blue Monster Reserve, a special wine label created by winery Stormhoek for Microsoft and its employees. The label on the bottle features a sharp-toothed blue creature and slogan "Microsoft – change the world or go home."

Since its inception by cartoonist Hugh McLeod, the cartoon has been adopted by microsofties as a symbol of the company’s and it’s people’s aspiration to innovate. I’ve heard Microsoft employees refer to it as the company’s unofficial mascot.

McLeod has a knack for looking at the world through the lenses of object-centered sociality. “Wine is a social object, and so is the Blue Monster: they both inspire conversation,” he is quoted saying in the article.

Besides the fact that Hugh is a killer cartoonist, he has helped traditional entrepreneurs turn tailored suits, and now wine, into social objects. This makes him a valuable of envoy or persona grata who traverses the digital divide which still too often cuts Web geeks off from the rest of the world.

It’s good to see theory brought to life in practice this way.

Comments

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Tommi
September 17th, 2007 at 8:58 pm (#)

Nicely built bridges there: from wine to social objects, from digitalization to (socio)web geeks.
Made a great morning reading – thanks.

Jyri
October 1st, 2007 at 6:15 am (#)

Thanks; I hope we see more social objects from Hugh to write about

Serge Lescouarnec
October 12th, 2007 at 11:01 am (#)

Jyri
We exchanged e-mails a few years back regarding Aula.
On the topic of wine, I wrote today on my blog ‘Serge the Concierge’ of the efforts to create new varieties that allow wineries to produce great wines while polluting less.
Here is the link to story
http://www.sergetheconcierge.com/2007/10/wine-goes-hybri.html
Take care
Serge
‘The French Guy from New Jersey’

Florian Bailey
October 22nd, 2007 at 12:18 am (#)

I really like your posts and talks about Social objects it fits well into a lot of themes I’m working on. Thanks for the inspiration. Are you going to be in Berlin in November (Web2.0 Expo)?
You have a comment spam problem …

James Whatley
January 14th, 2008 at 9:52 am (#)

Between your good self, Russell Beattie and Hugh Macleod I’ve been educating myself on Social Objects/Gestures etc…
Thanks for the insights, as ever.
J.

Withdrawal symptoms from codeine.
June 29th, 2009 at 6:12 pm (#)

Cocaine interactions with codeine.

Promethazine with codeine. Codeine. Codeine addiction symptoms.

Johnnie Moore's Weblog
December 9th, 2009 at 4:25 am (#)

Using an issue as a social object

Rob has a good post about KETC’s launch of an H1N1 blog, following on the heels of their mortgage-crisis blog. Rob’s been closely involved with US public broadcasting as it figures out how to navigate the waves crashing around all…

Ron Henry
July 24th, 2010 at 4:31 pm (#)

Interesting, I didn’t know that Microsoft had their own wine. Wine is definitely a social object! To bad the wine is only available to Microsoft and its affiliates.

Thanks,
AggieRon

Jets Shop
August 19th, 2010 at 4:49 am (#)

social object! To bad the wine is only available to Microsoft and its affiliates

Arnold Waldstein
June 2nd, 2011 at 4:02 pm (#)

Interesting post…

Keep a look out for my post with attribution to you and Hugh on Social Objects as contextual conecters.

You might like my recent posts @ http://arnoldwaldstein.com.

We are circling around the same filters as a took for cutting through the noise on the social web.