Giving Serendipity A Hand

OK lets get one thing straight - essentially there is really no such thing as a the Serendipitous Web. Unless you really do stumble across a site completely by accident (and I could imagine just grabbing random sites from the Internet would waste an awful lot of time) then most of these sites occur while you are looking for something in a similarish field. This means that we can intervene and give serendipity a helping hand by automating things and developing concepts to bring everything that little bit closer together. This is summed up nicely by Fantasai:

quote:

I'd like to point out to mpt that Google doesn't work because links \"serendipitously\" happen to make it work; it works because the designers leveraged some inherent characteristics of the system. What lots of people find related and relevant, other people are also likely to find related and relevant. On the Web, a large and diverse population writes about topics it finds interesting and/or useful and--because this is hypertext--these writers add machine-readable links to related pages. A standard search engine treats the web as a database of independent files. Google treats the web as what it was designed to be and is--a hypertext system. It's not an accident that Google works. It's engineering.

That said I do like the concept and term as chance and luck (as well as human ingenuity and curiousity) will be a major engine for the discovery of new and interesting online resources - accidentally stumbling across resources or just taking a risk and plumbing on through increasingly irrelevant search engine results just on the off chance that there is a useful result tucked away somewhere. So we can use the Serendipitous Web as more of a metaphor for how people stumble upon resources and so Giving Serendipity A Hand really means making sure they can always find similar related resources

There are different classes of tools that can help in this endea.vour:
Serendipitous Web Linking Tools

Well firstly things that help the other tools work more efficiently will also help the Serendipitous Web so also see:

Help U Linker

Now how to help serendipity:

1. Make information as fine grained as possible - forums, Wikis and Blogs are all great places for really drilling down into different permutations of problems.

2. Note everything down - Wikis and Blogs really help this process along and are one of the reasons I have implemented them on this site.

3. Collate information - find a way of drawing your information together so some nodes. I have found that the OzoneAsylum works well for this - its nature doesn't really lend itself to very fine-grained treatment of a subject (that is why I am going for the Gurupedia at the GN) but it does provide a way to draw together links to threads on different subjects (e.g. see the JavaScript preloading FAQ).

4. Install/create tools to automatically monitor activity on your site and note it down - U Ranker and U Linker are my first sttempts at this kind of thing and there is plenty of room for changes ;) There is a section for Serendipitous Web Tools where I'll drop in current tools and ideas for future ones.

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