Do you think some kind of algorithm, maybe to analyze the links you click and the contents of the page, maybe combined with keyword-matching (so that, maybe it wouldn’t bother doing much with news items, but would if it saw, say, that I was looking at biology-related stuff, for my major?). And then, somehow weighting importance depending on how long I linger on a page? For me, it’d have to include PDF’s (viewed in-browser, via that Safari plugin whose name I can’t remember), too. And organizing by date / link-thread / subject?

If it’s got to be manually-made bookmarks, I’d like a project-style way of managing them. I’m picturing an Exposé-style array of thumbnailed webpages, possibly with the ability to divide off subsets, and maybe star-rate for importance. But then you’re getting into far too much work (but I think it’d get natural very quickly). I know that I think very visually, and seeing a thumbnail like that would appeal to the way I’d like to organize data in my head… have it all out in front of me. Maybe this whole business could store scraps, relevant quotes, too? You could even extend it to a collaborative tool, like SubEthaEdit, in a way, with people all contributing to the well of references.

Maybe combining the two ideas wouldn’t be terrible: an automatic breadcrumb trail of where you’ve been (with each page automatically, intelligently rated for importance), which a little quick glance over would let you refine for your own use? I don’t know.

As for retrieving traditional bookmarks, this reminds me of what I consider an odd design decision of Safari – the whole “bookmarks as a webpage” idea – I feel like I’m encouraged to use that full-screen bookmark view in Safari, but that completely takes me off the task at hand, makes my lose my train of thought.

On the other hand, the History menu wins back some of my favor. It’s completely simple: recent web pages are all right there, none of this browsing-by-date bullshit. All you care about is that they’re the ones you were just looking at. I’ve often accidentally closed a window (and all eight of its tabs), and just had to go back to that menu to find what I’d been looking at.

It’s crazy that every browser doesn’t just have a “locate bookmarks” option. Jeez – they’re a standard enough format, usually, right? .url files? Your bookmarks really are your bookshelf in physical terms. Well, except that they only refer to the info. Umm. You know what I mean.

So, my UI development experience is limited non-existant. But these are ideas. And it’s 2AM. First final tomorrow!

I think the idea of tracking links, etc, is worth exploring although I have doubts about how effectively it could be applied. For your example, is it possible to accurately discriminate between news stories about biological weapons and journal articles related to bacteria? It may be possible, however, to apply some sort of Bayesian analysis to the links, similar to what Mozilla Mail/Thunderbird uses for classifying Spam. That is, after some training on what’s “important” (to you, the user) and what’s not, it’s able to make mostly accurate guesses.

Finally, in regards to the idea of a “locate bookmarks” feature: the real problem is that browsers *don’t* store bookmarks in the same format. Internet Explorer uses some proprietary (shocking!) binary file, if I recall correctly, while Mozilla and it’s derivatives use an RDF file. I don’t know what Safari uses.

At this point I plan to work on the Mozilla platform, mostly because it’s cross platform and explicitly supports extensibility. I’d love to extend something like Safari, but it fails on both counts: it’s not cross-platform, and I’ve found no documentation on extending it. I feel pretty confident in saying this, since I searched several times when I was considering porting mozCC (http://yergler.net/projects/mozcc) to Safari.

Anyway, thanks for the feedback, Andy; I hope you’ll give some more as this progresses.