Tools for Re-finding

This page of tools aimed at improving access to previously found content is a treasture trove of good stuff.  Two items that caught my eye for further exploration include the Visual Knowledge Builder and another intertwingling email client.

Details on some data mountain style hijinx over at surf*mind*musings.
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Posted at 9:8, Published in: Ideas

Recency in Interfaces

Tidbits explores the value of implicit personalization through surfacing recently used items in an analysis of the state of the mac. A yesteryear implementation was in a system called Super Boomerang and a current expression may be seen in iTunes (11-04-03). I wrote about windows alternatives for SB like functions 03-19-02.
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Posted at 0:8, Published in: Ideas

Interesting ideas around the blogosphere

Way.nu examines future prospects for knowledge management, calling attention to the importance of the context of a bookmark and calls for easy note taking and multiple categorization with bookmarks. The first simply requires a redesign of the add bookmark dialog, an item on my agenda for mozwho to equalize the bookmark editing integration in Firebird and the suite.  Here are the requirements:

• Add description fileld to bookmark
• File bookmark into category
• Move bookmark to category
• Assign mulitple categories/keywords
• the current plan is to represent this in the notes field of the mark, potentially in xml
• Store referrer in notes field
• also in xml

The post also calls for good local media indexing, a need I'm very familiar with but have yet to find a solution.  The ideal system would support xml-rpc or soap to integrate into multiple applications. I'll have more to say about "Searches should be shareable and interconnected to other domain experts" in the near term.

PB calls for a better bookmark manager with multiple categorization, a decent search (mozwho is almost there, lacking fine control of field and booleans), web export (planned feature).


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Posted at 1:37

Mozilla Bookmark Monitoring

I've been trying out bookmark monitoring in Mozilla, a feature hidden in non-default tabs in bookmark properties.  You'll never see this in a create bookmark dialog, but the feature does a head request for pages on a user definable interval and adds a flag if the page is due for a review.

There are several notification methods, none of which are ideal:  beep, alert, and icon change.  Icon change does not seem to work in Seamonkey but may in my version of Firebird. Alerting does work in Firebird, but this type of update is more likely to be useful upon demand, as opposed to a immediate notification. 

Anyway, the goal is to include updated bookmarks on your personal homepage.  Here's an example of the data from bookmarks.html where an update has occurred:

SCHEDULE="0123456|7-22|180|icon"
LAST_PING="1074978800"
PING_LAST_MODIFIED="Fri, 23 Jan 2004 20:53:14 GMT" 
PING_CONTENT_LEN="145816"
PING_STATUS="new"

The ping values in RDF seem wholely undocumented, but we'll see if I can expose them in RDF via localsearch.  See the post at n.p.m.rdf.

If so, the plan is to import your .opml blog subscription file, create a set of bookmarks with daily update checks, and integrate this info into the homepage.  This brings up a related RFE, to store a RSS location along with a bookmarks.
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Posted at 19:0