How does Squidoodlr work?
Technology
This is one of the outputs I wish Squidoodlr would give.
Squidoodlr is a page that generates possible topics for Squidoo new lenses. But these ideas are too specific, too useful to be randomly generated. For example:
- If beauty is based on bilateral symmetry, why are most hairstyles asymetrical?
- Places to cowork in NYC
- Mean tricks to play on your kids
- How to dry cotton T-shirts without wrinkling!
- Custom wheelchairs
- Geeks you love to hate
- When are you at your most beautiful?
- Is there a better alternative to Adobe reader?
- How to be a good grandparent
- … etc. etc. etc.
So my first question was: how does Squidoodlr actually work? It’s obviously not generating topic ideas with a randomization algorithm.
I thought it might be browsing the titles of top-rated web pages. So I searched for one of the topics it spit out, and I found this thread at Squidu. Squidoodlr doesn’t actually generate ideas. The ideas were submitted by users at the Squidu forum. Squidoodlr just selects a random one each time to call it.
Uh… That actually gives me an idea. The Quirkerator (fictional character idea generator), which I could seed with character traits from 1001 Character Quirks. What do you think? Any potential?
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