The Cyber Side of the Street

My Dad is now finally hooked up to the internet. For a long time, he had a little mail station which was a device that allowed him to send and receive e-mail, but would not allow for attachments or for navigating the internet. He is just starting out on his round-the-world discovery of cyber space. How exciting!

And speaking of round-the-world, I mentioned in a previous post that I can see where my visitors come from with the stat counter that is associated with this blog. It's not really big brotherish, but sorta, kinda. I can know if you've come here from say Boise, Idaho, and how long you stayed and if you've come here before and if you came here from a google search looking for a specific subject. Kinda big brotherish, but with the anonymity of the internet in that I don't know who is driving the computer that sent you here through cyber space and dropped you off in We Don't Buy It land.

LOTS of people have come to my blog looking to read about kefir. There seems to be a worldwide subculture of grain heads who are into kefir. (I'm one of them, but I didn't realize how many more there were out there. I speak curd...)

Some people, it seems, were wanting to find out about yurts in Connecticut and instead ended up at my blog at this post. My post which drew comparisons between yurts, and our house model, the Connecticut. If they read it, it might have amused them, but it didn't inform them about seeing yurts in Connecticut, or buying yurts in Connecticut, or building codes about yurts in Connecticut--to say nothing of zoning regulations... Try putting up a yurt in New Canaan or Greenwich and see how that flies. I bet it doesn't!

A couple of days ago a person from Berlin, Germany tried to find out about cakes. They did a search that said, "Birthday Cake to Buy in London". Someone is going to have a birthday in London some time and this nice Berliner is looking into finding out where to get a cake. How very nice. How thoughtful to be doing this kind of research for a friend, a lover, or a family member! Was this poor, kind soul directed to a number of bakeries in London, maybe in Kensington, or Covent Garden? No. They were instead diverted to my blog where they read a post titled, "Floam birthday cake...Yum!" Helpful, huh?!

All this to say that although the internet can open up the world to you with instant and varied information, it can also fling you across continents and oceans where you end up in a suburb of Chicago looking for a place to buy a birthday cake in London.

Watch yourself, Dad. Look both ways before you cross the cyber street.