RandomPage is useful for promoting PageChurn and for breaking down orphaned pages and groups of pages.
Contrast RandomPages, which is a small sample of random pages. Everyone sees the same sample of pages, which is regenerated periodically. By contrast, if ten people go to RandomPage, they'll get ten different sets of pages.
A form of SerendipitousNavigation.
After going through the PageDatabase dredging up interesting things for an unrelated project, I've begun to realize just how much of the site I have forgotten. Currently, in May 2003, it is nearing 2200 pages. I used to know all the pages, but after travelling I have forgotten a lot of them. I'm starting to think that it's important that TheCollective do something akin to AccumulatedRandomWalk. Everyone should visit a RandomPage a day and read it. That way, the PageDatabase's scope remains within the CollectiveIntelligence. Alternatively, perhaps we should have RandomPages here on MeatballWiki, which can act like a "Book of the Month" club. MeatballWiki's PageDatabase is hardly as noisy as WikiWiki's. -- SunirShah
Perhaps RandomPage should exclude everything marked as CategoryHomePage?
Less valuable than other pages in the database, though, so it makes the SignalToNoiseRatio worse, at least for me. --MartinHarper
It would be interesting and trivial to have a service that chose one at random. Many WebRings have random links. Yahoo has long since dropped their random link. Are there any for the OpenDirectory??
Wikis
MetaWiki lets you choose a page at random from the wikis in it: http://sunir.org/apps/meta.pl?random=all
Weblogs
via blo.gs: http://blo.gs/random.php
via weblogs.com: http://subhonker6.userland.com/rcsPublic/randomRecent
via [Blogwise] (right column)
via [Obscure weblogs]: http://www.ringsurf.com/netring?ring=obscurelogs;action=rand
Blogger: http://www.blogger.com/redirect/next_blog.pyra
Xanga: http://www.xanga.com/Random.aspx
LiveJournal: http://www.livejournal.com/random.bml