I Love Web Serendipity

There are so many ways to find interesting things on the web- searches, blog sites, RSS feeds, stuff that flies in via twitter, but my all time favorite is sweet serendipity discovering things by accident. It's the theme for my opening "TED Talk" like session (and just the idea of condensing a message into 10 minutes is another story).

I keep track of my "web serendipity" stories on my blog at http://cogdogblog.com/tag/web-serendipity/ but just had an amazing one this morning.

It all started as I was combing through my delicious bookmarks and came across the Generator Blog- a site that tracks little, often funny, sites on the web where you can "generate" images, text, media, dynamically.

I started with the Mob Name Generator, so meet Joseph "Shakes" Petrilli:

and found some other silly things like the Chinese movie generator, the Swedish Furniture Name, or next time some asks you for a reference, spit out something with the Endorsement Generator.

But then I came across PhotoSoup is a visual word puzzle generator that allows users to create word search puzzles with tag-photo pairs taken from Flickr. The tag is hidden in the puzzle, and only the associated photo is shown as a clue. The objective is to find all hidden tags in the puzzle before you run out of time.

I just made one based on my flickr account- it creates a word puzzle based on my own tags and my images as clues.

But wait! There is more! You can generate embed code to put a PhotoSoup puzzle in any web page. The size is pretty large, so I put in on a wikispaces site as a demo:

http://cogdog.wikispaces.com/PhotoSoup and even cooler is that every time it loads (I think) you get a different puzzle.

Its a good day when you start having fun looking at silly things and then fall into sweet serendipity land of finding neat sites like PhotoSoup.

I love this web thing...