I have registered my site for Orange's internet balloon race. I am getting quietly excited about it. And I also thought I have should have a new blog entry on my site to welcome the guests. It really feels like just before a party when the guests are about to arrive and you are worried that they will spot the only corner of the flat that you haven't cleaned. So here we go and dear guests, please don't look too closely in the corners.
The brilliant thing about this balloon race is that it makes complete semiotic sense. If you imagine the web as a loosely connected cloud of virtual ideas, then having balloons float from one idea to the next makes perfect sense. It also seems to tap into what happens when many of us surf: you float from one thing to the next. It isn't really hopping like it is when you watch TV, where the different channels have nothing to do with each other. For most of us I am sure when we surf, the sites that we navigate to have something however vague to do with the last site that we were on - if only syntagmatically by virtue of there being a link from one site to the next.
And also the balloons look great and they have these clever widget things that really work.