I'm a total geek, ok? I generally spend huge amounts of my time when not strapped in at work, browsing the internet as randomly as possible, whilst listening to music. Occasionally I find that I'm so engrossed in the music, that my browsing becomes less connected to the actual content of the pages,
and more like me just clicking links in time to the music. This includes sliding the scrollbar absent-mindedly up and down in with the beat.
So... my idea is to have a winamp visualisation which is also a browser... Bear with me here , as I'm flakey enough...
As you start your music, the screen is initially blank whilst the visualisation begins to read the bpm, volume, overall tone of the sound etc. These numbers are are used to select words from a built-in dictionary. In the background These words are then fed into a Google 'I feel lucky' type search, and the returned pages cached into memory. This would include a predefined number of sub pages within the site. Links to Images within the site would also be catalogued seperately, as would video content.
As pages are queued up, the Visualisation then begins to display the content in a dynamic fashion, the pages automatically 'reading themselves', complete with the scrollbar moving through the pages. The speed and general craziness of this display would again be connected to the speed/intensity of the music playing. HTML links are targetted by a floating 3D mouse pointer, which select the links, and one of a large number of page transitions are used to display the next page. Images on the page float over the main page, again in a variety of different ways (zoom fades, straight slide etc.) Video content is cached up, and displayed out of context of the site as a whole. Paragraphs of Text are on occasion taken from the page, and displayed dynamically in scrollers, or newspaper clippings. This would be especially common with 'quotes in articles'.
Once the site has been displayed sufficiently (perhaps a full site, a predefined number of pages, a single 'tree'), the next website is queued up and begins to display.
In order to make this a browser, it would obviously be necessary to freeze the visualisation at any time, and be shown a dynamic database of links to the recently displayed pages and content.
The entire title of the track, the artist, or any other ID3 tag information could also be used for searches, making the content more closely linked in to the music being played. You could also select single words from the title to generate your searches, allowing for content perhaps 'themed' on the title. Or, just set it to random.
For some reason, I see this on a big screen in trendy bars of the sort which I don't generally like, filled with attractive people I also will probably not like (or am not going to meet anyway, as I'm sat at home in front of my PC, listening to music.) You could add the root www of the page in larger type in the corner of the screen.
Which leaves me to sit back in front of my PC, put on my headphones and pick up a good book, knowing that my PC is browsing and listening to music by itself.