I had a very interesting discussion in London the other day with Seb Mary, a brilliant young woman who is exploring ways of using the online world to encourage new forms of community in the offline world. Mary’s most exciting initiatives, which are quite relevant to our interests here at the institute, are still under wraps and i promised not to write about them yet, but she did mention having coined the phrase “offline social software.” Amazingly when i typed the phrase into Google i got back “Did you mean “online social software.” Is Google trying to tell us something? Is the very concept of an offline existence unthinkable in the Googlesphere?