{spider} webs

In the middle of my day there were 5 minutes and they went a little something like this:

Via Flickr: Michael Holden

• @leashless aka Vinay Gupta followed me.
• 
  
• I got an email telling me so
• 
  
• I clicked to see who he was
• 
  
• I read his profile
• 
  
• I clicked on the link in his profile
• 
  
• I read about hexayurts (among many many other things)
• 
  
• I ended up on a page explaining how hexayurts were perfect on the playa (Burning Man – I know about this because a friend has been and came back raving about it)
• 
  
• I clicked in the top left of the page to see what the bigger wiki was I seemed to be in
• 
  
• I ended up on a massive wiki dedicated to ” collaborative solutions
  in sustainability, appropriate technology and poverty reduction.”
• 
  
• I clicked on Knowledge
• 
  
• I went to Information Technology
• 
  
• I read the entry and thought ‘I am not the only person who doesn’t know this is here and has never visited because I know at least 100 people I follow who could make additions to this wiki if they had the time but more importantly knew about it’
• 
  
• So I tweeted a link
• 
  
• Hopefully at least one of those people will take the time to share their knowledge
• 
  

That’s what serendipity looks like. You can’t plan for it, you can’t evaluate it, you can’t touch it or really quantify it.


It’s what the social web runs on and that was 5 minutes. So next time you are about to say ‘I don’t have time to do social media’ think about what you could achieve in 5 minutes. You can’t KPI it but if it’s only 5 minutes, does that matter?

What if the knock on affect is to save someone a days work further down the line?

Does that only matter if you know you saved someone a days work further down the line?

Do you only ever do things where you can see immediate impact in other areas of your life?

In this particular case, an unforeseen circumstance was @billpublishes tweeting:

Oops. I fell in love with the web again. Thanks @loulouk. appropedia.org/Welcome_to_App… wiki for sustainability, appropriate tech, poverty reduction”
— Bill Pope (@Underbundle) December 20, 2012

Didn’t see it coming. Couldn’t predict that reaction. Worth of evoking that feeling in someone?

Priceless.

Original post