Good things found by dumb luck
I do believe in the Six Million Dollar Man, but not Bigfoot… Now hold on to your comments, kids. I believe in Serendipity, I live and breathe its fumes for all of my online career.. How else might I have gotten to house sit for a month in Iceland, have a German Rock Band use […]
When I reflect back on being on the web for 17 years, I feel old and pathetically nostalgic. But then, a pinch of web serendipity buoys my up past the oosphere. It keeps happening again and again, the internet feels on one hand truly infinite in breadth and odd crannies, and then pulled to human […]
By sheer accident I stumbled across the google search results display that matches results to a timeline, here is a technology timeline This apparently lists results that have both your search keyword and a date. I cannot figure out how I got there, but if you take any standard results, say the big wide search […]
cc licensed flickr photo shared by Jenny P. If we just lived our lives out by setting, pursuing, and meeting objectives, what a sterile world it would be. Here;s to what you learn when you are not expecting too, and for surfing by serendipity. Serendipity is following the curious post titles in your RSS reader, […]
Again, nothing warms this web dog’;s heart that accidentally discovering something useful. With my two daily photo habits (@dailyshoot and 2010/365 photos) I am continually having to seek out specific bits of information. For dailyshoot I check in the morning what the assignment is usually by a visit to their twitter page or checking an […]
cc licensed flickr photo shared by storem
Some of my favorite software moments are accidentally discovering something new in a tool I’ve been using for some time. This happened recently my my current iPhone Twitter client, Tweetie 2. I’m not writing about this app, but I’d heard people rave about it, shrugged them off, then eventually later found out they were right. It is smartly designed.
I’d noticed when looking at someone’s profile that there is a number below their icon… (and actually I was not ego-ing my own profile, its just an example) (seriously) (I swear).
So what is #740,343? Perhaps its obvious, but I wanted to know. Maybe it is some sort of ranking, like I am the 740,343rd ranked tweeter. Yeah, I could only dream to rank that high.
My hunch was/is that it is more or less my database ID in twitter, a user number, and therefore, the lower the number, the earlier you joined. (later– this makes sense when looking at my RSS URL http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/740343.rss)
Harvard Law prof Jonathan Zittrain deals with big scary issues, like encroachment of first amendment rights online and the invasions of privacy from bad software. His recent book paints a possible dark future for the internet. So it was a wonderful surprise when on last week’s plane travel I watched his TED Talk on The […]
I’ve been mumbling in twitter (like anyone notices) about a very interesting data gathering/visualizing tool that rides the back coat tails of twitter in a clever way. I’ll spill the beans first, but stick around for the story and the after blog coffee, okay? Your Flowing Data (YFD) is described by its creator, Nathan, as […]
Maybe a flickr easter egg, but you cannot find this site from flickr’s explore, so check out the Flickr Clock. It presents a timeline of flickr videos: It may take a bit long to load as it seems to be hitting the flickr api pretty hard. So find an interval in time, and you can […]
I got something in the mail yesterday that moved me so much, it has taken another day to get to blog about it (is that slow enough for the slow blogging crowd). I have to weave a back story before I get to the punch line about getting something back (not tangible, but emotional) for […]
