Years ago I was out for dinner with the trade show crew of the company I worked for. The company was paying, so we went to a pretty nice Italian restaurant — nice enough that it had a sommelier. The local coworker assumed control of ordering the wine. He fancied himself something of a wine expert, and after a brief conversation with the sommelier, a bottle of a red wine was ordered; it was probably about $50 in today’s money.

The sommelier returned with the bottles, went through the ritual of opening it, and poured a splash into our wine expert’s glass to evaluate. He closed his eyes and went through the heavy inhalation, the swishing around in his mouth, the unpleasant gargle, until he held the glass up, peered at it, and said to the sommelier:

“The wine is very good…but the glass is a bit cabinet-y.”

The sommelier apologized, scurried off, and returned with new glasses for all of us.

We then enjoyed an excellent wine, with hints of cherries, tobacco, and lavender, and a finish with notes of embarrassment.

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Here’s a sticker I’d like to see inside a book sometime:

Let’s say you buy a paper version of a current best-selling book. You read it. You want to have it on your shelf, but you know you’re not going to re-read it for a while.

So, why not lend it to your local library? As the owner, you can reclaim it at any time, although maybe your library would prefer you lend it for a known term so that they can count on reducing the number of copies of a bestseller they have to buy. At the end of the loan period, it comes back to you, still warm from the hands of your neighbors .

And maybe the people in your community who read your book will sign the form as a way of thanking you.

Yes, this shouldn’t be confined to bestsellers. But that would help with the problem facing public libraries that the demand for recent books falls off sharply as the next bestsellers come along, leaving libraries with 99 more copies of 50 Shades of Gray than they need.

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It seems to me that what’s new about Circles (and Twitter’s “Follows” structure) is the weird way they mix the social and the public.

Google Circles are unlike a bunch of people sitting around in a circle talking about stuff, because G Circles are asymmetric: That I’m in your Circle does not mean that you’re in mine. So, when I post to my Circle, it has elements of the social (symmetric communication, the possibility of back-and-forth conversation, and the implication of a continuing relationship) but it also has elements of the public (asymmetric communication, more difficulty engaging in a back-and-forth because of scaling issues, and no implication of a continuing relation).

What are prior analogues of this weird intermingling of the social and the public? We could always be social, and we could always be public (to one degree or another). The casual and often unnoticed mingling of the two seems to me to be genuinely new.

(This expands on my comment to Robert Paterson’s post at Google Plus.)

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