Let's get lost - harnessing creativity through experimental web exploration

And I don't mean "middle of the Kalahari Desert without a compass" lost. I mean digitally lost, freely roaming the web like a 21st century nomad with no idea what you might stumble across next.

I recently discovered a book that shifted my perceptions about internet research and made me re-assess my entire approach to finding inspiration and information on the web. The most amazing thing about the book was the fact that it wasn't about technology at all. It was about travel.

The Lonely Planet Guide to Experimental Travel isn't a book about how to find places, it's a book about how to lose yourself.

Its wonderful premise is that you don't have to travel halfway round the globe to see amazing new sights and experience incredible new things; you just have to learn to explore familiar places in radical new ways. Suddenly your everyday surroundings become a playground and the world you think you know becomes a realm of new possibilities, new stimuli and unexpected discoveries

Amongst the many experimental techniques the guide suggests for exploration include drawing a straight line across a familiar city and following it as strictly as possible, encountering undiscovered places and challenging geographical obstacles that steer you away from the regular paths you tread. Another game challenges the urban explorer to navigate the city streets in roughly alphabetical order, traversing the town via a cartographically illogical but pleasingly random route that spins you off into unexplored avenues, revealing new sights at every turn.

The point of all this isn't to make a journey more efficient, logical or streamlined, it is to stimulate the imagination by inviting you to take the path less travelled.

So, how can you incorporate this deliciously rebellious sense of adventure into your work and apply the same techniques to internet research? Simple- just find courage to venture beyond the familiar confines of your Google search bar.

You see, the Google search engine is the package holiday of web navigation - it's great for taking you to popular destinations quickly and efficiently and showing you lots of obvious stuff along the way. Unfortunately it doesn't get you off the beaten track. Instead it channels you down the same well-worn path as the thousands of others before you who have entered the same combination of vowels and consonants and who are now following the same chain of websites to the same creative conclusions.

What we need then is a new way of navigating the digital metropolis of the web, not by the familiar thoroughfares thronged with thousands people all heading in the same direction, but via the back alleys and hidden passageways, through the exotic bazaars, strange shrines and wild, untamed neighbourhoods where new stimuli are waiting in the shadows to be discovered.

Fortunately for the more curious-minded digital adventurer, the benevolent gods of the internet have provided us with new navigational tools, improved travel maps and enticing invitations to explore our digital world in new and interesting ways. All we need to know is where to find them, how to use them and how to remain focused in unearthing what we want to find without getting sidetracked by the multitude of wonderful new distractions we find along the way.

There are many examples of these fantastic non-linear web browsing tools including Digg, Stumbleupon, Slashdot, Delicious, and Reddit many of which may not initially seem like obvious services for conducting fruitful web research but, with the right approach, can turn into powerful weapons in the researcher's arsenal. I'll approach some of these in detail in later blog posts but for now I'm going to concentrate on one site in particular: PMOG - the Passively Multiplayer Online Game.

Yes, PMOG is a game. It's also one of the most intriguing, fun and inventive ways of navigating the internet I have ever seen.

When you sign up to PMOG you suddenly find yourself in the middle of a game that you play without actually playing. Sounds barmy but stick with me on this.

Basically PMOG takes all of the conventions and dynamics associated with playing a multiplayer online computer game such as World of Warcraft and overlays them onto the sorts of activities you do passively on the web every day.

Suddenly you find yourself earning points for just browsing your favourite websites, gaining medals and awards for demonstrating certain patterns of web use, and gaining new prestige and powers as your experience grows. All for doing exactly what you do on the web anyway (only with the addition of a funky little toolbar at the bottom of your screen that keeps you up to date with your progress).

Players can even form tribal alliances corresponding to their web habits, booby trap popular pages in order to steal each other's points, leave bounty for other players to find or buy weapons, tools and armour in order to wage war against other PMOG players across the web.

Most interestingly however is the ability for players to create and undertake user-generated "missions"; themed chains of websites strung together by player-created "lightposts" (bookmarks) that earn points for those who follow them to their conclusion. With themes covering comedy, movies, philosophy, psychology, politics, art, technology and more, players are rewarded for exploring new pathways through the web created by real people with their own unique passions, interests and agendas.

Play PMOG for a while and suddenly the web is no longer a functional tool but a battleground, a labyrinth, a minefield and a theme park. Every webpage has the potential to become a deathtrap or a call to adventure, every player a digital tour guide, benefactor or assassin. You find yourself sidestepping places with heavy web traffic for fear of being ambushed, changing the way you use the web to earn a new badge or blindly following lightposts into the dark, unexplored recesses of the web with no knowledge of where the will lead.

You'll lose yourself in the tangle of the web and, find yourself in places you never knew existed. Who knows, inspiration may even be there to greet you at journey's end.

"The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes."