Dustin Diaz discusses the Object Literal form of JavaScript, pointing out benefits such as better organisation of code in a namespace / wrapper.
Douglas Crockford introduces the JavaScript Object Notation, a lightweight data interchange format that's giving XML-based web services a run for its money. Its a subset of the JavaScript programming language, and very easy for programs to parse or generate, and so its not surprising that all major languages now have JSON libraries/code snippets.