Bookmark Agent
I submitted this to Quarterdeck's Wish List on 18. Apr 97, but received
no response. If anyone decides to develop a product like this, I would be
more than willing to alpha or beta test it.
Okay, I'm getting fed up with maintaining my own bookmark list. As I imagine almost
anyone who browses the web every day has, I have hundreds if not thousands of bookmarks.
It's a pain in the neck constantly having to manually categorise each site. And then
just because I bookmarked it last week during a brief jaunt, doesn't mean I remember
anything about it.
Soooooooooooo, here is my wish list for bookmark software. A lot of the technology I
imagine can be taken from your WebCompass program (in fact, I'm trying to use WebCompass
right now to manually create summaries for each of my bookmarks. It's worked, but now
I've lost the categorisation of the bookmarks). Features my ideal bookmark program
would have include:
- Automatically categorise the bookmark based on a set of keywords for each category.
Depending upon how often the keywords appear in the document determines which category
the page gets added to. If the page doesn't have a certain amount of keywords that
match some category (say a page must match at least three keywords to be categorised),
then a dialog pops up asking you to define a new category. Maybe even an option where
it creates the category for you.
- Automatic summarisation of the bookmarked page. This should be able to be easily
displayed, maybe as a tooltip, as well as searchable -- see note on querying bookmark
list.
- Recording of last time visited and possibly context sensitivity -- so I know the
page I was on previously before bookmarking this page. Some sort of idea of what I
was doing when I bookmarked the page. The last time visited can be used to delete old
bookmarks that are no longer used.
- Ability to do queries on bookmark list and save those queries. I want to be able to
produce a subset of my bookmark list that relates on to certain keywords or key phrases.
Ideally, subsets should be able to be created from any field in the bookmark
database.
- Be able to track each time I visit the bookmark page. A lot of times I bookmark
something saying that I'll come back to this page, but forget which bookmarks I've
already visited and which I have already looked at. This allows me to create a list
of bookmarks I've only visited once or twice. This also allows me to create subsets
of my bookmark list of my most often used bookmarks.
- Ability to give bookmarks a rating. Bookmarks with higher ratings should be able
to float to the top. Or delete all bookmarks with low ratings.
- Ability to annotate/review bookmarks and publish those annotations/reviews. As
well as using search engines to find other people's annotations for the site. Say
you put a certain unique string on an annotated bookmarks. Published annotations get
indexed by search engines. Then when you want to view other people's annotations for
the site, the bookmark program does a quick search on say AltaVista for !!-Site
Review: siteurl-!! or something that is pretty unique. It then returns those results
to you for you to peruse other people's opinions of the site. This bullet is a little
sketchy, but basically some way for me to find out what other people think of the
site.
- And, of course, the ability to find out what URLs are still current and which no
longer exist.
That's a long enough list for now. If you do decide to develop a product like this,
I'd love to alpha/beta/gamma test it. Enough of agents that search the web. I need
an agent that organises the bookmarks I keep creating but don't have time to organise.
If you want any clarification on any of the above items, feel free to e-mail me.
Thanks.