When you Google a new downtown Ventura neighborhood group, its YourHub.com story comes up.

The organization is the Kalorama Coalition, a collection of homeowners who live along the lower reaches of Kalorama Street. Organizer Debora Schreiber posted a story and photo on the group in the Ventura Hub last month. Now, when you type in the words "Kalorama Coalition Ventura" into the Google.com search engine, a link to the story is among the top results.

If you don't want to Google right now, justclick here for the original story.

Schreiber mentioned the unexpected result to me Friday when we met at a business resource expo in Ventura. About 100 people representing small businesses in the county attended the event to learn about doing business with various government and public agencies and groups. YourHub.com promotions manager Angela Fentiman and I were there promoting these community websites.

The search engine link to the Ventura group is an unexpected benefit to using citizen journalism, the idea behind the heart of YourHub.com. It's hard to tell how often it will work out like that. The Internet, after all, is billions of unrelated pages hosted in computer servers all over the world. But this effect shows that despite its size, the Internet has the ability to connect us in ways that we might not originally expect. Put a message out there and people will have the chance to find it.

Newspaper fans often talk about the serendipity of grazing through print pages. I love it when I come across a newspaper page that has a captivating story about a topic I never before knew I would interest me. The more I use the web, though, the more I realize that chance connections between information and my interests happen there increasingly often, too. Call it electronic serendipity.

For the Kalorama Coalition, it's more than chance. The group put out a message that found its way into the Internet's most popular index. Now, people who want to find them can immediately locate their message on line. And others who are merely scanning the webpages, just as readers leaf through their newspaper sections, may come across the coalition as well.