Advertise here with Carbon Ads

This site is made possible by member support. โค๏ธ

Big thanks to Arcustech for hosting the site and offering amazing tech support.

When you buy through links on kottke.org, I may earn an affiliate commission. Thanks for supporting the site!

kottke.org. home of fine hypertext products since 1998.

๐Ÿ”  ๐Ÿ’€  ๐Ÿ“ธ  ๐Ÿ˜ญ  ๐Ÿ•ณ๏ธ  ๐Ÿค   ๐ŸŽฌ  ๐Ÿฅ”

Wikipedia contrails

Matt Webb recently posted his Wikipedia contrail, a record of his recent travels among the pages of the online encyclopedia. Neat idea. When I was a kid, we had a World Book encyclopedia which I read at any possible opportunity, and I would have loved to look back at where I’d been. Actually, it would be nice if Wikipedia kept track of this for me as well…maybe it does if you’re logged in? (I don’t have a Wikipedia account, so I don’t know.)

Anyhoo, here’s my Wikipedia contrail:

  • Jason Kottke - I’m working on a bio for a conference and I checked in to see what I’ve been up to recently. Apparently I’m married and working on kottke.org “part time”.
  • Cabinet of curiosities - Doing some research for an upcoming talk.
  • Stigmergy - Didn’t know there was a term for it.
  • Capote - Saw the film, went to read up.
  • Groove Is In the Heart - Couldn’t remember who sang this and “What is Love”. (A: Deee-Lite.)
  • Harper Lee - Truman Capote’s childhood friend, wrote To Kill A Mockingbird, won a Pulitzer for it, and then barely wrote anything public again.
  • Jack Dunphy - Author, companion of Truman Capote.
  • Truman Capote - Wrote for the New Yorker, most famous for his “non-fiction novel”, In Cold Blood, subject of the film, Capote, threw wicked parties.
  • Ann Coulter, Internet troll - These two are related.
  • .htaccess - Brushing up on password protecting directories.
  • Keratitis, Phlyctenule - Part of my eye went all weird and squishy one evening and I was trying to find out what was going on. Wikipedia was not helpful in this regard.
  • Taxicab geometry - Geometry of the driving cab, not the flying crow.
  • Perplex City - Linked into this from somewhere…don’t even really know what it is.

If you want to find your own contrail, type “en.wikipedia.org/wiki” into your browser and see what comes up in the autocomplete list. Here are contrails from Adrian McEwen, Tom Stafford, and rodcorp.