Entries classified under diversions

... I was running through the archives and found an interesting entry that could have been written about the Google Auto-Link fiasco. The title was, Who Owns Your Browser? and it is about per-site user style sheets. I had forgotten that Simon Willison, Adrian Holovaty, myself and many others hashed through a lot of this stuff almost a year and a half before Google's auto-link even hit the street and the issues are pretty much the same.

The discussion came out just as fractured then as it has this time around with the A-listers. Adrian's friends thought people using per-site user stylesheets to modify content would be a serious issue and that content providers would eventually sue, Simon was open to the idea that there might be some questions around ethics but didn't want to hurt innovation, and I said screw the content producers it's my goddam browser and I'll do whatever I please, thank you. :)

Maybe next holloween we can dress up like Winer, Scoble, and Doctorow and yell a lot? :)

The blogosphere is truly weird and amazing. I found out that there's a book I have to read that goes into the peak oil situation, expanding on this article. What's interesting is to follow the chain of events that will lead me to purchasing this book:

1. I wrote about the potential for a Ruby on Railsish stack for Python.

2. People link to this entry quite a bit placing it first in Google's results for the query python+"ruby on rails".

3. Alec was looking for info on Python and Rails earlier today and finds my ramblings.

4. Alec sees a totally unrelated link on my site to The Long Emergency, an article on peak oil that I read and bookmarked a couple of days ago.

5. Alec had been interested in peak oil for a while and jots down his thoughts on The Long Emergency article.

6. My technorati watch list notifies me that Alec linked to me.

7. I read Alec's piece and decide I need to purchase the book version of the article.

8. I purchase book.

Who could have predicted that web programming and the energy problem could possibly be related? The only real link between these two topics is interest on the part of a few individuals.

IMO, it's these types of serendipitous connections that make blogging a really interesting and unprecedented communications medium.