What’s your favorite passtime? Bowling? Surfing? Flying kites? How about golf, or baseball, or maybe stamp collecting? Have you ever noticed how when you’re looking up information about your hobbies or favorite activities you suddenly come across names you have never seen before and you start to wonder, “Who is this guy? Have I seen that name before?” Do you get just a little envious that someone else has earned a quiet 15 seconds of fame on the Web while you’re just sitting there surfing anonymously?
It’s not that you should feel creeped out at what you are doing. No, you should feel exhilarated that you get to look over people’s shoulders, enjoy the brief moments of their lives that are captured on the Web. Think about it. You’re getting to know millions (well, thousands) of other people you would never have learned about had it not been for the Internet. Take Dennis Tamburo for example. You would never know he played golf if you had not found this article, would you?
If you feel really curious you can try looking up Dennis Tamburo on a few people search sites, but is the guy really worth $40-50 of your pocket money? Of course not. You’re just curious about his name, not looking for an old bud from college or something. But in case you enjoy looking at social media sites and people search stub pages you can find plenty that mention people like you, me, and Dennis Tamburo. It’s not hard to do for most names.
When you get tired of doing that you can start searching on the names of Roman emperors, U.S. Presidents, great doctors, writers, artists, and actors. You can spend hours or even days looking up facts about your favorite movies, little trivia about foreign countries, the price of airline tickets and hotel rooms. The amount of information available at your finger tips is unbelievable.
And all that can arise solely from your curiosity in a single topic. Isn’t the Web an amazing place? It leads you from one idea to another and before you know you have spent an hour reading about people, places, and things you probably could not have cared less about — but you couldn’t just stop reading, could you? Gotcha!
