Have you ever been to the site Everything₂? Odds are, you're scratching your head right now and staring blankly at the computer screen.

I recently discovered the site after Googling the punchline to a Geek joke that I apparently wasn't Geeky enough to get (there go my über-Geek points). The site, which turned out to answer my question comprehensively, thus saving my street cred, also turned out to have entries on just about EVERYTHING.

According to the website itself, "Everything2 is a collection of user-submitted writings about, well, pretty much everything."

Everything₂'s concept is pretty simple. It's a multi-dimensional weblog joined together with the automatic linking of a Wiki. That is to say, its a website powered by a diverse user community that posts anything they want - writing about ideas, events, things, people, reviews... Then, the system automatically links words and phrases with other entries that contain those words/phrases. Or, in the terminology of the site, nodes are joined with other nodes.

Why is this so cool? Well, for one, it allows a reader to follow the writing in a random association sort-of way, stumbling from one entry to the next. It's a labyrinth of interesting ideas. In my case, I could spend hours getting lost on the site, clicking from one node to another to see where I end up.

So, for example, say I go to the site and search for "99 bottles of beer on the wall". I end up with two results, the first being a BASIC program that iterates from 99 to zero and prints the song... From that entry, I can click on the word "PRINT" and I end up reading about fingerprinting, two-dimensional works of art, and various other definitions. At this point I can keep wandering through to other words...

I also have the option of clicking on a link that says "I like it". If enough site visitors click the "I like it" link on your entry, presumably you end up in the "Cool User Picks" area on the homepage.

Even more interestingly, I can click on the "Chaos" link at the bottom of the page. This takes me to a "tag cloud"-like view somehow related to the entry in question. "Somwhere near print I got lost in..."

The first time I did this for the "PRINT" entry, I saw links to everything from "cout" to "George Washington's 1794 State of the Union Address" to "Marcus Garvey". But then, when I tried the exact same chaos, I ended up with a completely different set of entries in the cloud...

The possibilities are endless! It's better than a game of "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon".