When I was a kid, we would always get Columbus day often. We would listen to the poem about Columbus sailing the ocean blue in 1492, but it didn’t mean much more than that to me. We didn’t have a large Italian population or Columbus day parades. Today, I spent time thinking about Columbus day and had a few different thoughts.

It is easy to get distracted by many different tangents about Columbus and the time that he lived in. It was just fifty years before Columbus’ trip that Johannes Gutenberg created his printing press. What role did the Renaissance have in Columbus’ trip? How much did people really still believe the world was flat then? How much was Columbus’ calculations based on bad math or bad science? Did he know something based on his years as a captain see flotsam that fed his beliefs? Did he fudge his math to get funding? Is he a role model for entrepreneurs? Any one of these tangents would be fun to explore. Yet the idea that has grabbed me today is that of ‘discoveries’.

As the age of discovery gave way to the industrial revolution, various wars and the modern age, what has happened to discovery? We look at the big discoveries, searching space and searching the genome. Yet our lives are made up of little discoveries and bigger, yet personal discoveries.

How did we discover that great little store down the road? What did we discover about ourselves when we were there? What role does the Internet play in all of this? What about the stores that are seeking to be discovered?

A few months ago, I set up the music review section of this website. I want to discover performers who say something to me, that might get lost in the commercialism. I set up a place on Sonicbids where musicians could submit their Electronic Press Kits. The ones that job out at me, I blog about. I’ve discovered some great musicians this way and I hope others have discovered some through my reviews.

Publicists seek to get whatever they are promoting discovered, and I get many press releases every day about something I should check into. Sometimes, they even go a bit meta. One pitch was for likeZebra which is a website that seeks to help people discover new musicians. The site has been up for about a year and a half, but really hasn’t been discovered yet. The traffic is still fairly light there.

They are working on algorithms to facilitate discovery of musicians, but there is also a critical mass issue. Until enough musicians and fans discover the site people will have less reason to return. It becomes a sort of chicken and egg problem they are trying to get past.

Meanwhile, political operatives try to get their latest memes discovered and repeated. Staying fairly meta for a moment, I just discovered an interesting website. A friend on Facebook shared the link. I reshared the link. The link is to a Truthy tool to identify smear tactics on Twitter.

Truthy.indiana.edu, [is] a sophisticated new Twitter-based research tool that combines data mining, social network analysis and crowdsourcing to uncover deceptive tactics and misinformation leading up to the Nov. 2 elections.

It is an interesting project, but so far doesn’t hasn’t given me anything interesting. The top ‘truthy’ hashtags as #tcot - Top Conservatives on Twitter, #p2 - Progressives 2.0, #teaparty, #obama, and #sgp - Smart Girl Politics. It is worth digging into this site a lot more.

Then, there are the bloggers seeking to be discovered, or at least build audience. There are various communities to do that and I’ve written enough about sites like MyBlogLog, BlogCatalog, EntreCard and Adgitize.

Beyond this, various stores, businesses, and other groups seek to be discovered.

So, how does all of this relate to self-discovery, or big discoveries like Columbus’s? I’m not sure, but I’ll continue to poke around this.