It’s been a crazy day.
A couple of days ago, we saw a huge spike in the number of visitors to SenseList, thanks to a mention on digg.com. That was pretty cool, especially since SenseList hadn’t yet attracted a great deal of attention since we launched the site in July. But today, we saw an even bigger surge of interest, this time due to a mention in Yahoo! TV’s daily The 9 (we were #5). In both cases, the post that attracted so much attention was 32 Weirdly Specific Museums. Which is funny, because that was, for me, one of those off-the-cuff, phone-it-in kinds of posts, based on an article I wrote for Interesting Thing of the Day way back when: Museums of Interesting Things.
Prior to today, I hadn’t even heard of The 9. But it was the eeriest thing to be watching a video of this perky blonde, in a very E.T.-style show, rattling off the day’s hottest nine Web pages according to Yahoo, and to have her mention SenseList as though everyone had heard of it already—complete with the SenseList logo I created up there on the screen. It was like seeing my own name in the newspaper or…I don’t even know what to compare it to. Very odd. But, I mean, way cool.
Meanwhile, Morgen and I spent the afternoon hanging out with Jillian Hardee, who has written a couple of articles for Interesting Thing of the Day (Highgate Cemetery and Assateague Island). Jillian, who lives in West Virginia, was in town for a conference her husband’s attending, and it was a delight to meet her and show her some of San Francisco’s interesting spots. The three of us turn out to have quite a bit in common. For example, we’d been planning to take her to see 826 Valencia, a pirate supply store (really), and during lunch she happened to mention how much she liked pirates. So that was a pretty groovy coincidence. We also visited Mission Dolores, all three of us having a fondness for cemeteries.