Design for Interactivity

My idea is based on people using the word 'random' incorrectly. It is a mathematical term meaning there is an equal chance of anything happening. For example if you roll a dice, there is an equal chance of any of the 6 numbers coming up, so the number is randomly selected.

People then starting using the word to represent a decision that appears to have been made randomly. For example if you put every possible colour into a hat, and picked one to be your hair colour, it is unlikely to be a normal hair colour pulled out. In life, however, there is not an equal chance of having black hair and having green hair. If somebody then dies their hair green, people might say "your hair is really random". This of course isn't random, as they chose green, unless they actually pulled the colours out of a hat, which is just strange.

Now, this bad use of 'random' has escalated, and people will say it when meaning something mildly different occurs. I hear things like "let's go to a few random pubs" which means "let's go a few pubs we have never been into before". In order to go to a random you could put the names of every pub in your City into a hat, and pick. Other random generators could be tossing a coin, spinning a bottle, rolling a dice, or using a calculator or computer's random function.



My idea is to search web 2.0 sites for people who use the word 'random' badly, and display a random site from within this search.

Initially I wanted to save the search results from just 'random' in a few web 2.0 sites, and then by clicking a button it would display a random page. This proved, after a couple of weeks trying, to be out of my range in terms of coding. It would require knowledge of xml, php and actionscript, and the ability to convert them in Python, a language used to write google applications.


I took a slightly easier route, and have had some success, with some help from Paul on the actionscript, and various forums and tutorials. I have managed to write a program that searches google for the word 'random' plus another random word, it then displays the top result from a randomly selected web 2.0 site.

There a couple of problems, firstly the display of the page only works 70% of the time for some unknown reason, and goes to a google search results page the rest of the time. Secondly, the other word being searched has to be pulled from a list, but I don't have one, and cannot find one to borrow (steal). The result being either I type every word I know, or get the user to type in their own word.

I have written the code for the user typing in their own word, but this no longer becomes random, and is selected by the user. I think I will have to try harder to get an array of words from the internet somewhere.

Please leave any suggestions as a comment, thanks.