Surfing for facts or for fun?

I can remember when I first got word of the 'internet' back in 1992... described to me as the 'information super-highway'... I asked my cousin at that time what that meant and she kind of fumbled through a non-explanation. As the world-wide-web flourished, the term 'surfing the web' became commonplace.

I never saw myself as someone who 'surfed' the web. Pretty much a calculated destination each time... whether for going to a known site for information, or using it to resource information that I had no idea where it would be. This was probably 'surfing' but I used to think of surfing as more of a session of meandering through different things that grab your attention, with no real destination in mind.

This morning during a 30 minute period, I experienced both; a 'sourcing info' session and a good old random surfing session (again - I don't really do this part... find it usually pretty fruitless).

My sourcing session involved typing words into my Google search engine that probably 5, definitely 15 years ago would've been totally foreign to me and made no sense: "winamp hijacked location bar search".... wow even now that seems to make no sense, but I'm sure you reading will get the gist. Sure enough, within two minutes I found a direct hit on how to reinstate Google as my default search in the location (address) bar in Firefox. Whew. Disaster averted... Fun? Not really. But impressively informative considering I would have no idea where else to begin looking for that information if not in 'Google'.

My surfing session was initiated by a friend's feed on facebook... a posting for a story: "Bing Goes the Internet: The Creepiest Jingle Ever." with a little image of the Microsoft 'Bing' logo. I clicked it to find the story on www.mashable.com that MS had just had a competition to find their new jingle... Great, another 'music writing competition' to serve another blow to my industry that's already competitive enough... Okay, perhaps I am a little annoyed that I didn't know about it until it's too late. At any rate, it had the video and the song by a guy named Jonathan Mann, who writes / has been writing a song a day and is up to around 220. His 'Brief History of Creative Work' piece on YouTube is quite unbelievable. How did it effect me compared to finding out how to reclaim my google search engine? Though it doesn't have quite the same practicle applications as the 'location bar' solution, it was inspirational. Here's someone who, as I write, is penning a new song for today. I've never met him or heard of him before, and although his 'product' (what his music sounds like) is of little consequence, the key element to focus on is the process that he is going through. The process that he has committed to. One half of success is creating something worth talking about. The other half is talking about it. With those two attributes combined effectively, you're on your way.

I know that I won't get this inspired/lucky with every click-provoking headline, but at least I can (hopefully) count on searching for any problem and knowing that someone, somewhere has experienced the exact same problem, found the solution and posted it.... No matter how you slice it - I think this 'information-super-highway' thing is definitely gonna catch on.

GF