Good things found by dumb luck
Are You Talking To Me? by cogdogblog posted 6 Sep ’08, 9.49am MDT PST on flickr Next time you need a good nom de plume, try the Mob Name Generator. Tell them Shakes Pretiili sent you. Yes, I am all over the Generator Blog a nearly infinite list of fun little things to do on […]
flickr photo Autoretrato com Colorado by Paulo Brabo
Maybe two months from now will mark the 15th year I have been on the web. This will be October 29, exactly at 10:30am, 15 years to the minute when I inserted a floppy disk labeled “Mosaic” (in perhaps a Mac Quadra 900) that my Maricopa colleague Jim Walters had handed me, and had said, just with a smile, “Try this”.
Profound moment indeed.
In all this time, I have never lost a shred of excitement over those crazy serendipity happenings, connections, opportunities, that present themselves only because the web was there. Things that would not have happened otherwise, in that creepy parallel universe where there is no internet, no world wide web.
So I am going to toss out a few and see if others pick up and share there own. My stipulation is that each story much have a link to an artifact of the story. Cause if there ain’t a link, its not a web.
I have tons of stories, but will keep it to three.
Perhaps your head is exploding with all the new stuff coming out of every electronic orifice. It might be useful to consider how you go about getting your dose? Maybe it’s RSS, it might be clicking every link shared by a Jedi master, or slogging through the plaff of twitter, heck it might even be from a magazine.
I have a technique that never fails to give me a lift (when it works), yet I can hardly claim it is reproducible. It’s equivalent to kicking over a rock when hiking just to see what might be hiding underneath, when you find something cool (or just as not, squishy) in an expected place.
For a while I have been saying I should keep track of all the useful or interesting things I have found online by sheer serendipity. The best part is the surprise factor, and that it is very likely something that is not in everyone else’s news feed.
One source that works occasionally is scanning the links people put in their e-mail footers. Sure mostly it is their blog, or their company, or their math department.. but quite often people put links in their footer to something they are truly passionate about. When the listservs I read are dull, I scan the footers.
The one I can remember is someone on the Second Life Educators List had a link to Free Rice, a fun site that offers a multiple choice quiz to identify the meaning of a word:
For each word you get right, we donate 20 grains of rice to the United Nations World Food Program.
Okay, 20 grains is pretty small, but spell a lot of words right and…. But its a great concept that ties together two unrelated goals (getting “smarter” and feeding the world) in a clever way.
How about yet one more example of neat things that happen when you share your stuff? This is a photo I posted a month ago on flickr; it is a wooden drafting table my Dad had used back in the 1950s and after years of storage in an attic, I decided to re stain it: […]
CDB readers know my affinity for stories of web serendipity; strange or wonderful connections made that otherwise would have not happened without this “internet” thing- here’s another gem. I’ve forgotten where I first stumbled across on slideshare Power Point 20th Anniversary Cinderella. In 19 slides of lengthly bullet points, inscrutable charts, and exposition, it tells […]
This story is old news if you followed my trail last month through Australia. Being up again in Strawberry, Arizona, and seeing flowers tll blooming in mid November (global warming is hot here) got me thinking again about the most amazing example of web serendipity that happened in Tasmania. It’s one of those thing that […]
I’m still scratching my head to find out exactly why I think this is interesting… I just have that tingly feeling. But as we see ever increasing of interest in virtual worlds, continued explosion of web things, mashups, and mobile technologies, its the connections of them that seem to intrigue me the most. Although I […]
I love it when curious link clicking reveals unknown gems! It happened again just an hour ago, with the result of a great video collection tool. Almost by sheer accident- discovered following a tweet by Judy O’Connell to her web 2.0 presentation on Slideshare, that I came across this nifty new site, vodpod. Here you […]
Talk about serendipity! I can count on one or two paws the number of times I've clicked on a Google AdSense ad. But in reading my inbox in Gmail, someone wriote about blog writing, and there was a link to Free Web Word Processor for your Blog.  I bit and look what I got!  it's […]
I just love it when I find something cool on the web by accident. We Blog Cartoons does something almost no other cartoon site does– it lets you republish the cartoons without any copyright restrictions (how many times have you used that New Yorker one about “no one in the internet knows you are a […]
