“Thanks to the connective nature of hypertext, and the blogosphere's exploratory hunger for finding new stuff, the web is the greatest serendipity engine in the history of culture. It is far, far easier to sit down in front of your browser and stumble across something completely brilliant but surprising than it is walking through a library looking at the spines of books.”
Schulmeister (1997), too, writes about the serendipitous benefits of being “lost in hyperspace”, a proposition supported by Kuhlen (1991): one of the benefits of getting lost is that it fosters explorative behaviour, a point we shall return to later. The relationship of serendipity to information seeking is further explored by Foster and Ford (2003), who observe that some people encounter serendipitous information more than others, implying that other factors may be at work than serendipity. So what exactly is meant by serendipity?
