The Research Evangelist

I've often told friends that I believe in serendipity. One definition of serendipity is "the occurrence and development of events by chance in a happy or beneficial way." Or even better maybe, "an aptitude for making desirable discoveries by accident." It's like saying "it's a small world." That happens to me a lot, but the world is not small unless you make the effort to actively connect with people and engage in real human conversations. And if you use the online tools available in the way they were meant to work, like Twitter, you can make real human connections by sharing what you care about with the world. Online communities provide opportunities to build authentic connections that can blossom into offline friendships, business relationships and networking. In the online cancer communities, really positive and interesting things happen to me often. I recently made an amazing new connection that came about because of some old connections an