One of blogging’s greatest pleasures, often unspoken, are the truly serendipitous connections one makes. Not networking in the conventional sense, but unexpected encounters with people who find something on my website that connects with them and they reach out. These are often unexpected but always meaningful.

When I started blogging back in 2008, I wasn’t entirely sure what it would become. It was intended as a space to archive my academic work, share interesting links, and perhaps pen some “mini-essays” on technology, learning, and creativity. It has been all that and more. What I didn’t fully anticipate was how it would become a nexus for unexpected, often profound, human connections—embodying David Weinberger’s idea of the web as “small pieces loosely connected”. These moments of “serendipitous connectability,” turn chance online encounters into powerful and sometimes emotionally touching discoveries.

Just yesterday, an email landed in my inbox that perfectly encapsulates this idea.

To give some context, back in April 2023, I wrote a post titled “The Gardner Who Changed the World.” In that post I wrote about Gilbert Daniels, whose 1940s research showed that designing for the “average person” means designing for no one. His “jagged profiles” insight—that individual measurements never align with averages—revolutionized design, leading to adjustable cockpit seats, flight suits, car seats, and bike helmets. This shift from mythical averages to individual variation transformed everything from aircraft to educational systems. Gilbert Daniels did change the world.

Despite this transformative contribution that touches all of our lives, his revolutionary insight and personal contribution have been largely overlooked. Even the obituaries focused entirely on his botanical work while ignoring what may have been his greatest legacy. In my post I documented how I had repeatedly tried to get the Indianapolis Star to publish a piece recognizing Daniels’ true impact on the third anniversary of his death, but never received a response.

Until yesterday.

Yesterday I received an email from Gilbert Daniel’s daughter. I will not share the email here but what i learned is that Gilbert Daniels, despite being a highly accomplished individual, across a variety of domains was also extremely humble and modest. In fact, he did not aggrandize the true breadth and depth of his accomplishments and impact. In fact, his daughter found out about my post just recently (when it was forwarded to her by another relative).

This email truly moved me. As someone who researches and writes, I rarely know if my work reaches anyone or makes a difference. Just knowing that my piece helped the Daniels family re-connect with their father’s remarkable work and impact underscored how shared knowledge creates unexpected connections and illuminates obscured histories.

Coming back to how I started this essay, This experience recalled other instances where the web’s “small pieces loosely connected.” The rest of the post lays out the myriad ways in which the .

Back in January 2010, (see my post Palindromic Poetry in Prison) Sandra Gould Ford emailed that she was teaching poetry to incarcerated men and women, finding my palindromic poems a “marvelous encouragement to their creativity.” I was deeply touched that this strange form of poetry, something I do just for fun, was being used so powerfully.

Palindromic poetry came up again, in an email I received in 2011, from an aspiring poet and 8th grader in Colorado (see The gift that keeps on giving). He had stumbled upon my palindromic poetry while researching a school project and wanted to know more about my inspiration. His follow-up email contained his own palindromic poem, “Falling Snow,” which was “doubly palindromic” because the words themselves were reversed, adding another layer of complexity! He must be 27 years of age now, and I do hope he is doing well.

One of the most amazing goosebump-inducing instance involves Gandhi and ambigrams (that I wrote about in Gandhi, ambigrams, creativity & the power of small pieces loosely joined). Oriya poet J.P. Das discovered one of my ambigrams online, leading to a surprising revelation: Gandhi himself, in the tumultuous months before his assassination, had playfully attempted bilingual ambigrams of his own name. Finding such an intimate creative connection with Gandhi, mediated through my web pieces, was truly amazing. Moreover J.P. Das and I have stayed in touch and, in fact, I visited him in Delhi many years ago.

And then there was the email from Nora, daughter of the renowned poet Grace Paley. Nora was responding to a poem I had written (“Poem or Pie,”), a tongue-in-cheek response Grace Paley’s poem: “The Poet’s Occasional Alternative.” For my poem to connect with her daughter—not something I had ever expected.

Countless smaller connections prove equally meaningful. When I criticized a “Periodic Table of Typefaces” design, designer Camdon Wilde responded with remarkable grace, leading to a wonderfully respectful conversation (archived here and, at a meta level here). Even discovering a plagiarist who’d copied from the Root-Bernsteins’ Sparks of Genius led to a positive interaction with webmaster Rita, who transparently removed the plagiarized articles upon verification, and how a student’s sharing of Edward Weston’s “Excusado” photograph prompted me to write about “véjà du“—seeing the familiar with fresh eyes, and more importantly, accepting the fact that there is no excuse for not finding beauty (even in a toilet). A wonderful lesson indeed.

I could go on and on. These gifts “that keep on giving” are a constant reminder of the human connections that are fostered when we share our work and interests openly. These moments of serendipitous connectability, where we connect with strangers through shared ideas or unexpected discoveries, make the whole act of blogging profoundly worthwhile.