Invisible Inkling

Ryan Sholin on the future of newspapers, online news and journalism education.

All About serendipity

Muxtape as a model for an anti-recommendation engine

July 2, 2008 – 10:57 pm

Muxtape has my attention.
It’s not terribly social. It’s not much of a network.
In fact, it’s so devoid of features, there’s little to distract you from listening to music, which is what you showed up to do.
The front page of the site is dead simple: A colorful list of mixtapes to listen to, with relatively opaque [...]

Help a reporter out

March 19, 2008 – 9:03 pm

Peter Shankman launched something really, really interesting to me today at HelpAReporter.com.
The premise: He works in PR and has a list of reliable and credible sources a mile long; his reporter friends are constantly asking him who they should call about [your story topic here].
Check it out, sign up, and maybe you can help [...]

Search drives serendipity, a continuing conversation

July 31, 2006 – 8:19 pm

[Ed. note: This is the text of an e-mail I sent in reply to a comment a J-School professor from the University of Florida left on a post from a couple months ago regarding Serendipity on the Web. Part of his reply is posted at the end of this post.]
Hi Prof. McKeen -
Thanks for your [...]

Serendipity on the Web

May 18, 2006 – 2:02 pm

Steven Johnson, author of Everything Bad is Good for You, makes an effort to do away with the vicious rumor that the Internet, Web, RSS, blogs, etc. have killed serendipity.
For the uninitiated, or those who merely like words such as “ephemeral” or “paradigm” but try not to get bogged down in definitions, serendipity is the [...]