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.