New word learned

[meatspace location: work]

Learned a new word today: Spime.

It was coined by Bruce Sterling (about the only cyberpunk author I missed out on back in the age of cyberpunk), and is taken to mean an object with a defined location in space and time, but also with a story (for example, not just a book itself, but what the book's about, who's selling it, how it was reviewed by all sorts of people, who's seen a review of the book, who's got it on their bookshelf, and so on, and so forth). In other words, it is not just the object itself, but how it interacts with its environment, and how its environment interact with it. Or at least that's my understanding of it.

How did I come across spimes? I'm currently reading Peter Morville's Ambient findability (and yes, I know I should have read it a good couple of years ago, but at least I'm finally reading it).