Looking at the details of my del.icio.us account, I realised that I could see the notes which other people had stored about the same article as I had just tagged.
I’ve always had a penchant for precis; never really understanding the need for many words when a few, well chosen ones suffice. Today’s invention is a program which looks through the selections of text people have saved in connection with a given article. It then overlays these so that the frequency with which a given word in a passage is saved causes it to be coloured correspondingly.
In this way, sections of text which were widely deemed important would appear bright red, with those slightly less important coloured orange, yellow etc.
This would form a ‘contour map’ of every bookmarked document. The continuously updating maps might be pasted back into the original documents in order to allow for faster, more effective reading (or better editing). Separate maps could be created for eg interest, importance, limited intelligibility etc.
