But those are all when you have specific questions in mind already, when you have a specific goal in your searching. It's like the difference between searching for an article on Wikipedia and going on a wikiwalk or hitting "random page" a few times for fun. There's no real equivalent to a wikiwalk on search engines, and collections of websites on a given topic or word of mouth are a lot more like that than like a search engine.
a novel and magazine collectors' series?
- Thread starter F. King Daniel
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But those are all when you have specific questions in mind already, when you have a specific goal in your searching. It's like the difference between searching for an article on Wikipedia and going on a wikiwalk or hitting "random page" a few times for fun. There's no real equivalent to a wikiwalk on search engines, and collections of websites on a given topic or word of mouth are a lot more like that than like a search engine.
So you use Wikipedia for your wikiwalk, and don't try to use a search engine to do your random browsing. Or, you get onto a Blogspot blog and simply click "Next blog", and it will take you somewhere random.
I don't understand your need to expect a search engine to do something more random than be a search engine.
Let me understand your want: You want a "collection of websites on a given topic" that you seemingly don't know exists yet, even though you are "interested in stuff" - but you can't give that topic to a search engine?
What "stuff" are you interested in?
terpette said, "What I need is a list of blogs and sites that have this sort of material", so those search terms are already known.
^Doesn't Google have a button on its homepage called "I'm Feeling Lucky," which is for random browsing-type searches? Except when I just went there and tried it, it just took me to a page of Google-logo "Doodles."
Yep. But it still uses a "topic". Instead of getting a list of 20, 50, 100 websites on your topic, "I'm Feeling Lucky" takes you to one of those websites and doesn't offer the rest.
This is something that we tried to address during my tenure at the magazine: the news section became a much less important part of the magazine, simply because of that sort of time lag. For much of my time, there was no official Star Trek presence online - StarTrek.com in its first incarnation died not long after I took over, and the new variant came about towards the end of that time - so everyone (including me of course) gravitated to unofficial sites like Trekmovie.com for their news. It's much harder to get people out of that habit.
But print can do a lot, and while I personally think that a digital magazine would be the way to go, there's still a demand for hard copy.
Back on this topic, I honestly don't think you'd find a publisher who would be willing to invest in a partwork based on the books... the sales figures on the books would need to be a magnitude greater than they are for a viable percentage of that audience to be likely to buy something on top. So yes, this is where the internet scores... I love reading things like Chris Bennett's annotations to stories in the same way that I devour the annotations to The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen issues
Paul
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