#817: Readaware

I pay a daily visit to a number of websites. One of the best for content is wired.com (even though the page structure and navigation are laughably poor).

The trouble is that the content often does not update as fast as I can read and the individual items are not maintained in their original order…so I end up scouring each page for items of interest amongst a rag-bag of other stuff, some of which I have already dealt with.

Today’s invention is a browser plug-in which remembers the history of which articles I clicked on yesterday and simply doesn’t load those elements of a webpage ever again (unless I explicitly ask for this to happen).

The plug-in might also detect those items which I scrolled past without clicking and exclude those from today’s page too…if I didn’t care about them yesterday, I care less today. (This might be adopted in connection with search engine results. Those entries the browser knows I scrolled through, but didn’t click on, might be used as weighted examples of what not to look for when a button marked ‘rerun the search based on unclicked items?’ is pressed).

All this cuts down the time required to get to the good stuff (and might well expose the relative dearth of real, original, readworthy content).

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