Referreriffic

One of the more fascinating things about this whole blog racket is the way you often get chance visitors wandering in from other blogs, solely because they happened to be nosing around the wonderful world of Blogspot at roughly the same time you posted. This is quite fascinating, in that you end up with a fairly random (there's that word again) slice of the web, or at least that part of the blogosphere hosted within the borders of the Google Empire.

I like the idea of a list that forms on its own, without anyone making a conscious decision to categorize all these blogs together. You could call the list an HTML found object, I guess. Or an instance of order (of a sort) emerging from chaos, perhaps. The repressed conceptual artist inside me -- and admit it, we've all got one -- really lives for this kind of stuff.

[Technical note: Maybe you didn't know this, but when you click on a link from one page to another, your browser cheerfully gives the new website the url of the page you came from. That's what I mean when I say "referrer". Some random visitor was at each of these pages, clicked "Next Blog" or did something else that sent them from there to here, and left visible footprints in the process. Some browsers let you disable or monkey around with your referrer field. If you use Safari, you might want to take a look at PithHelmet, which gives you control over this and other stuff.]

So here's a list of recent Blogspot referrers, with spam "blogs" weeded out, listed in no particular order. At the risk of imposing arbitrary structure on this delightfully unordered list, a few blogs I thought were standouts of the bunch are in bold. Not that I'm trying to influence you or otherwise reduce the local entropy level, mind you.

The image, incidentally, is a random walk, a topic of ongoing interest in math, physics, and CS. The researchers at the University of Texas note they're using a physical source of true randomness, not something generated by a computer, which would be pseudorandom at best. So it's not really the same sort of thing as what we're talking about right now, but it's an interesting subject on its own, and the resulting images seem apropos to our topic, at least in an aesthetic sense.

So here's our list:

• Liftakna
  
• fender_girlz_world
  
• More Ohio Backroad Pics
  
• RP Guest Services
  
• Sobre Futbol
  
• "Space" [twentysixtytwo] (Astronomy pics)
  
• The Gathering (Baptist)
  
• VCC HS Boys Small Group
  
• Don't waste the pretty
  
• Mind Spa
  
• "life is a zoo in a jungle..."
  
• Best Blonde Jokes
  
• Straight Flushing
  
• mitt liv som schweizare
  
• econhour3 - top article right now is about the Olympics.
  
• Rainbows and Storms
  
• Viñas y sierras del oeste argentino Not a lot here, but it's about Argentinian wine, which I (and my wallet) are fans of.
  
• Through the Eyes of the Beholder
  
• Aziza's Island Oasis
  
• Foreclosure of a Dream
  
• Marcela Infante
  
• The Parker Land
  
• KGV Library Zone
  
• Adam
  
• Say NO to Jim and Dawn Gibbons. A liberal/progressive blog from Nevada.
  
• marcelleqb
  
• for yu hui
  
• زیر گنبد کبود (The blog name's in Farsi, as is most of the blog) I don't know very much about Iranian music, but the song linked to in the post "Throwing something out of my circle" is quite nice, I think. Also a recent post about the Oscars. I have to agree, I too am pleased that Brokeback Mountain didn't win.
  
• Diario de un sufí de Alcorcón An art & poetry blog from Spain, which also has an Oscars post. Well, a photo of Jack Nicholson. (gag! blech!)