Sunday, June 8, 2008

Web Browsers and Non-Linear Thoughts

I'd like it if there were a better way to track down non-linear thoughts. Generally when I'm thinking to myself and writing things down I become a bit irritated at how our writing system is very linear. True, when writing, one can branch off on various topics, but it gets messy and hard to track the flow of ideas.

I'm not sure what the best way would be to deal with that with regards to outputting information, but I was thinking of ideas that would improve the recording of this with regards to gathering information, along the lines of a plugin for a web browser.

With regards to surfing the net, I often end up bouncing from one topic to another, and it would be nice to be able to look back and see some history of what I was looking at. I'm not sure what this would tell me, but it might yield some interesting results. On Firefox, it'd be nice if you could look up a history, where each page you had visiting would be displayed as an icon or thumbnailed screenshot, say the earlier ones you'd visited at the top or left, and subsequent pages that you had linked to would be displayed connected to the initial page. When opening other tabs the parent node would have multiple children. When within a single tab but going to a page not linked from the initial page, such as using a bookmark or the search bar, it could link the parent to child node with a dotted line or something.

Maybe I'll look into this when Firefox 3 is finalized. Or I should go look at Flock. I've been wondering why there hasn't been a last.fm for browsers before. Well, I should see if Flock has something for that.

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