One thing that is really cool about living in the real world is serendipity: the ability to discover something that you were not looking for in the first place. How many times have you been looking for a book in a bookstore and finally leave the place with a book you never heard of before? (you buy books, right?)

A blind man

In the world wide web, this doesn’t exist. Apart from a few attempts to bring unexpected content in e-shops - aimed at having you spend more by cross-selling similar products - the web is just like the world as seen by a blind man. You go to where you want to, you sometimes get lost, but you rarely discover things you were not looking for.

Helpful neighbor

That’s why sites like digg, stumble upon, del.icio.us and brothers were born lately. To help you find something you are not looking for. But isn’t it ironic? You have to visit regularly a place to find things that you are not interested in in the first place. It’s just as if the blind man paid a neighbor to talk about the latest events in the neighborhood: Mr Smith just moved, a certain Miss Doe took his place, she seems well educated and nice.

That’s a very partial vision of things, and the blind man may never hear about this porn shop that just opened a few blocks away, and where he would love to go every once in a while, all that because his neighbor wouldn’t want to be seen there (by a blind man?).

Web vicinity

Back to the web. What if, every time you go to a site, you had to pass in front of some others? Not random sites, but a constant sequence of sites, depending on the place you’re at and the place your target is? When I say place, I think IP address. I’d love to see a widget which detects existing websites around the routers and proxies leading you to your target, and show each one of them briefly (one or two seconds) during the course of your request.

Of course, you would have to see quite often websites that you may not want to see, but it’s just like a mean neighbor that you have to greet when you cross his path, even if you know he beats his wife and watches TV all day long. And you know what? Life isn’t better when you only see nice things (that’s the big mistake of the Disney corp.). On the contrary, the more you see, the more you get to compare things with, and you vision of things becomes better established. In a word: the path to enlightenment.

It’s not that fun, but it’s good

Once again, it’s not about related sites, webrings or some other site deciding for you (according to user ratings or redactors review). It’s not about ad-paid fake randomness, and it’s not about giving you surprises. It is about recreating an environment, having time to discover something through repetition, and finding where you are in the giant map of the world wide web.

In the long run, if you really can’t stand your neighborhood, you can always move.