In the process of making some sort of point about “random story” buttons on news sites this morning, I added one to this blog. It’s up top in the nav for now. Look for the obviously labeled link that says “Random Post.”
Or just click on this thing:
But let’s be honest.
This isn’t a serendipity engine for you.
It’s for me.
So as I watch the traffic on my blog get inflated by friends and followers mashing the “random” button today, I tried it myself, and took a tour through the forgotten, irrelevant, and abandoned ideas archived on my blog. (There’s also some good ones mixed in there if this thing’s working right. Right?)
It’s an amusing five-year time-travel tour.
Here, I’m enthusiastic about Skype. There, I’m done writing about media for a while. Here, I’m hiking in the Santa Cruz mountains, spotting a coyote. There, I’m in Caracas on New Year’s Eve. Here, I’m writing about freemium business models. There, nytimes.com added social network sharing icons to their stories. Here, I’m celebrating Tom Delay’s indictment. There, my daughter is born. Here, I’m at a conference. There, I’m unimpressed with San Francisco.
It goes on like that. Does Flickr have a button that shows me something random from my own photostream? I’d probably like that.