{"id":400,"date":"2006-05-26T09:15:50","date_gmt":"2006-05-26T15:15:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/wp\/?p=400"},"modified":"2006-05-26T09:15:50","modified_gmt":"2006-05-26T15:15:50","slug":"the_serendipity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=400","title":{"rendered":"The serendipity trail"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Never let it be said that I don&#8217;t like a good technology-mediated conversation. My favorite recent one is on the topic of serendipity and whether the web enlarges it or shrinks it. I&#8217;m not sure whether the discussion is trivial or profound, and that&#8217;s precisely why I like it. The latest <a href=\"http:\/\/news.bbc.co.uk\/1\/hi\/technology\/5018998.stm\">installment<\/a> is from the BBC&#8217;s Bill Thompson. If you haven&#8217;t been following it, it all began with an <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sptimes.com\/2006\/03\/26\/news_pf\/Perspective\/The_endangered_joy_of.shtml\">op-ed<\/a> by William McKeen, which stirred a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.stevenberlinjohnson.com\/2006\/05\/can_we_please_k.html\">response<\/a> from Steven Johnson, which provoked a modest <a href=\"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/archives\/2006\/05\/the_systematize.php\">contribution<\/a> from myself. There are also some excellent comments, particularly on Johnson&#8217;s post.<\/p>\n<p>You know, I&#8217;m feeling frighteningly big-hearted this morning. I&#8217;ve already sent a love note to Tim O&#8217;Reilly and his crew, and now I&#8217;m praising the internet as a medium for exchanging ideas. That Google Brain Plug-In must finally be working.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Never let it be said that I don&#8217;t like a good technology-mediated conversation. My favorite recent one is on the topic of serendipity and whether the web enlarges it or shrinks it. I&#8217;m not sure whether the discussion is trivial or profound, and that&#8217;s precisely why I like it. The latest installment is from the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-400","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/400","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=400"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/400\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=400"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=400"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=400"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}