If Only Kevin Bacon Had a Blog

April 15, 2004

Hey, everybody. I’m afraid there’s not a whole bunch of hilarity on tap tonight. But I have a good excuse — no, really!

So, anyway, here’s the thing. See, I’m a computer programmer by profession.

(And a guy by birth, a smartass by choice, and a cynic by virtue of a series of strange and unfortunate circumstances. I’m also kind of a pervert, but I can’t trace that back to anything in particular. Come to think of it, I’m not sure any of this is really relevant. Let’s get back to the entry.)

So, I program for a living. I’m a hunchbacked, squinty-eyed code monkey. No, really, I am. I promise. But I realize that I’ve given you precious little evidence of my mad coding skillz in our many months together. Or our few days together, or ten minutes, or whatever. How the hell should I know when you got here?

Anyway, the point is, as refreshing as it is to escape from the woes of my technical job by… um… well, by typing on a computer keyboard for hours every night… jeez, I really didn’t think this through very well. Aw, turdburglars.

Anyway (again), apparently just sitting at a computer in my spare time isn’t enough. Lately, I’ve been feeling the itch to do a bit of recreational code-slinging, if you know what I mean.

(Which, in this case, is just what I said — recreational code-slinging. Sure, I’d like to make a euphemism out of it somehow, but it’s just not happening. You can’t win ’em all, people.)

So, I spent some time this evening whipping up a script that you might find interesting. Or you might not. Or it might not work exactly right yet — there’s really no guarantee with these technobabbly sort of things. I’ll do some more testing tomorrow, when I’ve had some sleep.

Anyway, here’s the scoopage — I’ve been thinking lately about the old idea that we’re all separated by six degrees or less of separation. So there are no more than five people-hops between you and anyone else in the world, when you count all the people you know, and all the people they know, and so on, and so on, and so on once more.

Well, that got me thinking about blogs, and all the greasy, lubed-up linky-love between them. And I wondered — just what sort of blogs are six degrees of separation removed from mine? So I decided to find out, and so the script has hatched.

(Yeah, I wanted to say ‘born’, but the thought of anything coming out of me that way is just not cool. I don’t care if it’s just 1’s and 0’s — it’s not a mental image I’m prepared to deal with right now.)

Anyway, it’s called the Six Degrees of Technorati Separation, and it’s linked on the sidebar to the left.

(Ed. Note: Not as of May 2012, it’s not. Technorati rejiggered their API a looooong time ago, which completely horked my script. I finally got around to giving it a decent burial. Sorry!)

Give it a shot, if you’ve got a weblog of your own — it’ll dig into your Technorati referer list, pick a random site, and then dig into their referers, too. And then their referers, and theirs, and theirs, too, and finally someone else’s. It’s not terribly useful or anything, but it keeps me amused. Or at least it will, for the next couple of days or so.

So, there you go. No stories or ridiculous rants tonight, but it’s not like I wasn’t thinking about you. I was toiling away to build you a… um, well, an interactive piece of… uh, goodness. Yeah. You know, now that I describe it, I wonder why the hell I spent all night doing it. Dammit, why do these revelations never come to be before the fact? Sheesh. Good night, folks.