(If you're busy and/or hungry for news, just click the link in the next sentence and ignore my chain-of-coincidence outline.)

My sequence of events leading a useful link for students keeping up with the news and a lot of metainformation about it...

1. Get e-mail alerting me to a "spam" comment on a blog I hadn't updated in months.
2. Log-in at old blog to delete spam.
3. Write a new item in that blog to point people to my current home.
4. Digress into a local issue about Radford's school colors.
5. Post an item in this main blog linking to that discussion.
6. Reflect on difference between two blogging programs.
7. Realize that since starting my new job, I haven't been keeping up with the adventures of Dave Winer, the wizard whose blog software I've used for more than five years.
8. Discover that Dave has been doing some very cool things (again) with The New York Times news feeds, which he had a big hand in creating in the first place. Now he's combined his already streamlined "river of news" version of the feed with an outline format, another great passion of his. (In fact, Dave wrote the first outlining program I used, about 23 years ago.)
9. Discover that Dave, like me, loves corny quotes and metapuns, even when they're not original. (But I refuse to say "I heart...")
10. Follow link to more about Times metadata and archives and find a link back to another innovation of Dave's -- pointing out keywords in Times feeds. Hover your mouse over each of the numbers on that page to see what the story is about.
    
11. Follow one of those "metadata" puns back far enough to find an interesting site about how Public Broadcasting uses metadata, which includes a good definition for anyone scratching their heads about the word  -- or any students searching for another "Media & Society" semester research topic. Browsing around that site will have to wait until my homework is done. Perhaps 2008.
    
12. Write this, with a few re-entries and revisions.
    
13. Get back to work.

(Metapun: This whole digression is about coincidences because I never metacoincidence I didn't like.)

4:48:37 PM  #