Tools for managing large amounts of information
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Re: Feature requests for 1.9 / 1.10
There is one thing that has been vexing me with web browsing for several years and that is the management of the huge amount of information that flows through the browser. I have a few feature requests that address this issue and this request is one of them in this topic.
In this feature request I suggest a toolbox for categorizing and helping the user finding patterns between information located on different websites. A general toolset for helping the user conducting research.
- Websites go down, webpages get deleted or the information therein get changed. A way to manage that is to cache it, save the page or archive it with a website such as archive.org. It would be cool if the web browser can handle that seamlessly.
- Text hilighting in different colors and don't be stingy with the hilighting color set. All color hilighted text get added to a pure text summary page that the user can add his own text to make his own summary of that web page. There should be a visible distinction between the hilighted text and user edited text. An auto-generated reference following say the Harvard-system would be even cooler.
- The ability to use hashtags and hashtag management to trace the different pages a research is conducted on. The hashtags entries should be database-like such that hashtags can be used as folders. It's an extension to using categories; a web page may belong to several categories, that's why simply using folders/directories doesn't work. If it could be visualized graphically it would be cool. On could visualize overlapping folders where the size is determined by the number of entries for each hashtag for example.
- Add an ability to link different pages to each other by marking a visual connection between them. That way a mind-map could be built and visualized.
I think with a toolbox like that could for example make social science research more efficient. If one could save the structure, either as a backup or for sharing with other people, that would be better. In another feature request I suggested isolating into different sessions. I think basing it on top of session isolation may be necessary so as to define boundaries between what gets saved and not. One may want the hashtag system to be global though.