Sometimes the juxtaposition of two unrelated ideas accidentally begets an interesting, new one.

Yesterday, MyBlogLog told me that two different visitors arrived at my site, one from a search engine search on “San Angelo tamale“, and the other from “New York subway turnstyle“. It’s delightful to see such disparate cultures linking to me (however tenuously), and to watch my analytics dash put pins in the map representing tourists from all over the internet.

On the other hand, this morning’s NY Times showcases a thumbsucker on Google’s (so far uneventful) attempts to break into the radio business and an up-close-and-personal on Walmart’s internal investigators — while giving shorter shrift to new data on the income gap between the richest and poorest Americans (it is growing) and to the whistleblower case claiming the federal government deliberately and systematically undercollected royalties from big oil at the expense of U.S. citizens and Native American nations.

Oh well.

If you’re in LA and have nothing better to do for the next 36 hours than hang around with geeks of various stripes, come join us at BarCampLA. Drop-ins welcome, it’s all free, there’s food, beer, and stuff, and though you’re encouraged to participate, enthusiasm more or less qualifies.

It’s hosted at Little Radio. Potentially addicitive bonus: Guitar Hero.

An apology to readers who track this site via RSS feed. The way Feedburner has rendered my del.icio.us posts as a daily aggregation (without a good headline) has seemed sub-optimal to me for a long time. So I was pleased with my recent discovery of the FB setting that renders them individually, with specific headlines. (And I do try to be mindful of the fact that pages I tag are effectively being blogged here.)

When I switched it on, though, my RSS readers were treated to a dump of over a month’s worth of del.icio.us posts - sorry about that!

Feedburner friends take note. One of these days I’ll burn a separate feed so that readers can choose whether to include the del. items - though of course that’s another feature FB could easily offer. Guys?

While I’m on the subject, how about letting me splice in my Twitter posts?

Salim Ismail has joined Yahoo! as head of Brickhouse, the nascent in-house incubator. Fantastico - after seeing all the enthusiasm from the Pipes launch (and hearing a lot of on-the-ground interest in it at SXSW), I look forward to seeing what comes next in the life of this exciting idea.

Posts:

• Salim Ismail
• TechCrunch
• Bradley Horowitz

Like a number of my friends and colleagues here, I re-initiated my Twitter account at SXSW (here’s my profile). Having dry-tested it a few months ago without getting the aha, I figured I’d take advantage of the momentum it seems to be picking up here to see if I could make it useful.

Despite the fact that I can’t seem to get it to actually send SMS updates to my phone (probably a blessing given the volume of posts going around among the harder-core users), I am finding it useful as a way to update multiple people I’m trying to coordinate with simultaneously. (Not to mention fun.)

At a party last night, talk turned to the question of whether mobile was finally happening, given that here were a bunch of mid-to-late-30’s-plus year olds using their cell phones like a bunch of high-school students. My answer, from the 3rd beer party of the night I’d converged on with multiple different but overlapping friend groups, where 80’s hits were playing and people were running around in fur hats and underwear? Only because we’re behaving like them in the physical world.

I’ll be in Austin from the 9th through the 14th for the interactive portion of SXSW. Just like last year, I can’t stay for the music portion, much as I’d like to.

But if you’ll be there and want to connect, please drop me a comment or email.  There are lots of events on upcoming too - including the Yahoo! party.