The guy who runs Metafilter and AskMetafilter has added a few new features recently including the ability to see who have marked either your posts or comments as their favourites.
I was kind of surprised to see that one question I asked requesting people describe their “perfect moments” (what someone else compared to Maslow's “peak experiences”) had been marked by five people as a favourite even though the question pre-dates the implementation of these new features by a couple years.
Ask MetaFilter is a great resource for answering questions and librarians could probably learn a bit about dealing with reference questions by how it works (for example, why do so few “Ask A Librarian” programs fail to archive successful answers on their web sites? Why do they not open up the answers to the community-at-large rather than relying on their own singular or limited team expertise? Hmmm, I think I smell a paper in there somewhere!)
Metafilter's creator tends to frown on “chatty” questions like the one I asked but these types also tend to get the most/best responses. Another similar one about “defining childhood memories” is stunning in what people share about themselves, both positive and negative.
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your story (that top one is yours, right?) about sitting in the park in Paris drinking an expensive pop is really funny, because I have almost the exact same story with the same very fond feelings (I was drinking a Coke Light, though). I'm actually wondering if it was the same park we were sitting in.
I don't know if that was the single happiest moment of my life, but I do remember an amazing peaceful feeling as I sat and watched the people and the city around me.
Yep, that's my story about the $6 pop. The park was just outside the Louvre, literally right beside it. (I don't know the name but a Google Maps search shows one that looks likely: http://tinyurl.com/qnlzj
I've had lots of moments like that in life (as I suspect most people do) but I always think of that one especially fondly.
Another coincidence – I posted a question about coincidences on AskMF too!
Lots of good discussion: http://ask.metafilter.com/mefi/8934