The tangled web.

This is a story about how the internet works. I haven’t tried to extract any meaning from it, and I’m not sure there’s any to find, but I find something charming in its serendipity.

I no longer remember how I first discovered Daring Fireball. It’s been in my bookmarks since before I had a Mac, in my newsreader for as long as I’ve known was a newsreader was. Although I’m not as interested in the minutiae of Apple as I once was, it’s still one of my favorite websites.

Last month DF’s John Gruber linked to a blog called Big Contrarian, promising “Good writing, interesting links, and an original, thoughtful design.” I added it to the newsreader and promptly buried it at the bottom of the list. Occasionally I invoked the “Mark All in Feed as Read” command to soothe the uneasiness caused by unread items.

A week or two ago I added 43 Folders to my newsreader. I’ve been aware of the site (and its proprietor Merlin Mann) for a long time, and have even been an occasional visitor, but I never thought I was the intended audience — I seem to get by just fine without any “lifehacks.” More recently, though, I’ve become a Merlin fan from his hilarious Twitter and, through that his You Look Nice Today podcast, so I thought I’d give his website a chance. It grabbed my attention, and I began paging back through the most recent posts.

In one of Merlin’s posts I saw a familiar-sounding link — Jack Shedd’s Big Contrarian, the same blog Gruber had recommended. I dug it out from the bottom of my RSS feeds and began paging back through his most recent posts.

Jack’s blog soon revealed another familiar-sounding link — the personal blog of Diana Kimball, one of the people behind the fantastic ROFLCon. I read the essay Shedd had linked to — which I highly recommend, incidentally — and then (naturally) I began paging back through her most recent posts.

It only got worse. From Diana’s blog I found one of her other projects, a neat video series called The Tim and Diana Show; from there I found her co-collaborator Tim Hwang’s site, The U.S. Bureau of Fabulous Bitches (which is excellent, and much more cerebral than its title lets on). From there, I decided I had better quit my newsreader and look out the window for a few minutes.

After spending the whole morning skipping from blog to blog and slurping up content as I went, I looked up and followed Tim and Diana’s Twitter streams — fully aware that I risked starting the cycle over again. Who knows how many blogs I’ll end up subscribing to when I’m through with those?

But then I noticed something odd: Tim has been following my Twitter stream for two months now. I imagine he ran a search on ROFLCon and pulled up my mindless tweets from back in April. Maybe I’m leaving another trail of links leading in the opposite direction.