TECHNOFILE: TECHNOTIP

In celebration of its first year in this form, Technofile comes over all self-referential, revealing an ambition to conquer the Antarctic, and getting excited about the search engine that appears both to have the powers of prescience and to have created an imagist poem to the page

The Excite search engine offers a string of words which it thinks might be worth adding to the search term you submit to it. Even if you don't take up the options, the results make nice little automatic poems that give a whimsical gloss upon the work you're doing. For "Technofile", since we're in a self-referential mood this week, it came up with "jiggling audiofile frum wag collages dreamscape compton kosova camcorders sniff".

I was impressed. Only "frum" and "Kosova" appear to have come from this particular Technofile, rather than other Web presences with similar names, but in picking on a Melanesian cargo cult and a Balkan conflict, Excite seemed to show an understanding of what makes Technofile tick. "Kosova" was a remarkably astute choice, since I ran the search before a brief item on the province appeared on this page two weeks ago. It was almost as though Excite knew that I was going to come back to the topic, which I first wrote about in March.

And even though "audiofile" and "camcorders" are scarcely poetic, Technofile is indeed a kind of collage, if not a dreamscape. I've no idea how "jiggling", "wag" and "sniff" got in there, but they do add a hint of loucheness, however unmerited.