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Serendipity was my tried and true method of research as an undergrad. It was a perfect method – lacking structure, motivation, and purposeful direction I used what information fell into my lap to write research papers :). This morning, the NYT published a short piece on the role of serendipity in online information seeking this morning that I thought might be of interest.
The article discusses how Twitter has re-designed its site to encourage more searching & serendipitous discovery. There is an interesting connection here to what Tim Westergren discussed during his talk at ZSR last year about the difference between crowd-generated opinion and expert created metadata and the role that those two sources of information play in unexpected discovery of new information.
I do not think that the Pandora model and the twitter model are entirely in sync with each other but it is curious to see how central a role the idea of serendipity plays in discovery systems.
1 Comment on ‘Serendipity re-appears in online search’
So, did you serendipitously find this article while working on your dissertation this morning? However you found it, thanks for sharing, it was an interesting Sunday morning read. I, too, attribute my graduate study success to serendipity and think it’s a very satisfactory way of discovering valuable information!