So, I have my news sources, I have aggregators working for me. I have handy bookmarks and homepages. And I've realized that I don't do any surfing anymore. I've selected news sites that I think will give me what I need, but outside of me finding specific information, there isn't much I do to find new sites of information. For example, all of my links in the last post were from other people (friends, and blogs/news sites). How does one originally find out about my porn name? It seems an impossible task, although once I know about it there are easy ways to find it.
The majority of web popularity though, does seem to be simply from word of mouth. Where'd you hear about Homestarrunner? I heard it from a friend, and proceeded to tell my friends that didn't know. Eventually it will get featured in some sort of piece of news declaring its popularity (for example Time magazine) only increasing its popularity with people outside of this particular loop.
So what ever happened to browsing anymore? I've realized that when I'm browsing, I just look through my same news sites in cycles. Every now and then I'll be forced to find a specific piece of information and browse outside of these sites, or one of my news sites will inform me about a site that they found or was told about.
I could go into more anecdotal evidence here, but looking at my most recently used bookmarks, I've noticed a distinctive trend. But maybe that is just the way of the interenet. It is primarily based on a referral system. Without a link (hyper or conversational) you go nowhere. Hmm...
Maybe I just don't like the fact that once I've chosen my news sources, I'm forced to read whatever they give me. Kind of odd.