matze77,
I too refresh the chatterbox by randomly clicking on those listed in Other Users. It is a great way to learn about your fellow monks. I too was interested in a way to find interesting home nodes so I wrote Homenode Surfing. Unfortunately, it is no longer possible to run the code because the PM Stats page has been "temporarily" offline for a long time now. I believe I still have the list of interesting homenodes on my scratchpad though.