During a presentation yesterday about the future of news media with Clay Shirky, the idea of "a chatroulette for news" was jokingly mentioned by Chris Thorpe.

Inspired by this, and knowing that we produce lots of interesting content that is never promoted on our front page, I decided to see if I could build something to help people discover this content.

This is the result of that experiment: http://random-guardian.appspot.com

Going to that site will give you a random webpage from today's Guardian. It's surprisingly addictive.

It's just another way to find stories on our site.

If you'd rather go directly to the random page, without the toolbar at the top, bookmark http://random-guardian.appspot.com/randompage instead. You can also try http://random-guardian.appspot.com/random/technology or any other section (eg. society, education, sport, etc), and you'll be sent off to a random page in that section.

As a quick disclaimer, this is the product of about 3 hours of hacking (and about 2 hours of blogpost writing!), it isn't fully realised, and as such might change, move, or go away entirely at some point. Thanks for your understanding. </disclaimer>

Some technical details: It was written in Python, pulling data from our content API, and running on Google app engine.