You know the way that some pages you see on the web are more important than others?
Those are the pages that change your thinking or take you in a new direction.
For the sake of this idea I’m going to call those pages “data-points”.
I want a way to be able to instantly record those data-points in such a way that it is very easy for me to scroll back through them and get to them in the order that I looked at them.
Now you may say, well why not just use the browser history?
I do, but I HATE it. I’ll tell you why!
I look at hundreds of pages a day, when I want to get back to data-points from last week it takes ages to search through the pages – half the time I can’t remember what the title was, or a good keyword to search on, so I just have to manually sift through 500 or so pages in the history sidebar to see which is the exact “influential” page I’m looking for.
Ok, so now you say just bookmark it!
No. It’s too time consuming.
I can’t be bothered to find a folder, categorize, and store it and I don’t want to mess up my nicely organized bookmarks. Anyway, even if I did just randomly add the 20 or so data-points I saw every day my bookmarks would get way to long. And bookmark browsing isn’t the right paradigm to be browsing those type of articles.
So put it in delicious you say? No. I don’t want the world to see what I’m thinking about.
What I want is a quick way to be able to add data-points (ie bookmarks) to a data-point stream (stored locally) as I discover “infulential” pages that change my thinking. So, for example, lets say I hit the key combination of CTRL+SHIFT+D, it would pop-it onto my personal data-point stack.
Then to make it perfect I would want a nice interface to browse my data-points by day, week, month, year etc.
It would be cool if they were displayed in a way similar to google search results, with a title and an abstract in the listing.
It would also be cool if I could search them.
I wouldn’t want them on an external site. The perfect scenario would be if my data-point tracker was a firefox plug-in. This would make everything zingy and snappy and would be local and private.
So, come on Firefox Plugin developers!
Make me a data-point snapshot thingymajig dammit!
