About a week ago I was exploring other random blogs when I came across the 7 Things This Week [#172] post by Jarrod Blundy. What caught my eye was the number on the title: Jarrod has been persistently listing seven things each week for more than three years already! In this day and age of single-click fire-and-forget retweets I find it admirable that someone can resist that urge to share the links immediately and do instead a little bit of curating, even adding a sentence or two of their own justifying why a particular link is interesting.

It surprised me too that literally just a random collection of links had this effect on me, so I dug deeper using Gemini’s new Deep Research feature. (And this time I mean that Google AI, not the Gemini protocol.) I must say Gemini is impressive: it formed a research plan according to my ramblings, then went away and crunched the internet for maybe ten minutes or so, and eventually returned with a convincing full report of the history of “lists of things” in print and online media.

I’m not going to bore you with all the details, but I learned, for example, that the Time magazine started a Potpourri column of random things already in 1923. For the online world, an early example of something similar is Dave Winer’s DaveNet newsletter that started in 1994. I looked it up and found the DaveNet archive – and oh boy isn’t it a treasure trove if you’re interested in the early world wide web! Dave covered, for example, the browser wars that I also recently referred to, and the rise of the new and exciting programming language called Java. Dave wrote his newsletter for ten years and posted between one and a dozed emails each month, so check it out!

As for myself, I won’t dare to commit to posting a regular list of things, but I’ll keep the concept in mind and start now with a very short list. Specifically, it’s a shout out to a couple of my favorite YouTubers and their most recent work.

Random Things Sunday