Serendipity35

Last year at this time, I wrote a post called "Bookmarklets and Favelets" about using social bookmarking tools and sites. It's a very average post with a useful list of links to social bookmarking sites. The week it was posted it probably has about 100 direct hits. (The number at the end of each post tells you how many people actually linked directly to that post. A hit on our home page probably leads someone to read the latest post but that post doesn't get any "credit" for that in the count.) I looked at it today - 21, 333 direct hits. The post has a life.

I thought briefly about being a journalist when I was an undergrad. If I had ended up making it to the big show - say at the New York Times - I would write pieces that people would read and then throw away. True, some pieces get reprinted, clipped out and saved (I still do that all the time), anthologized or end up in books, but the vast majority disappear. That's depressing.

This post (and hopefully some others that are much better) will be read more in the months to come than it will be read this month when it is fresh and new. I like that a lot. Traditional (and paid!) journalists are also reaping this benefit of online publishing. Their writing gets read again and again online long after it appeared in print on paper.

I guess Tim & I could think of getting hit on a million times in another way too. I checked the dictionary and found "hit on" (No, not to make, especially sexual overtures to) also means to discover or meet especially by chance. That's a perfectly serendipitous way of looking at this.