When I am searching for information on the internet I always end up with a lot of tabs open, which can become quite irritating when the amount goes beyond the screen’s width, and I have to use the arrows to move through it all.  I end up with multiple search results and am not sure which pages are from which search terms.  An application could be created to organically track which results came from what searches, and which pages lead to which search terms.

For a recent project I was researching how to create an online drawing application in Flash and ActionScript 3.0, but I wanted quite specific tools within it.  This meant I had to take bits of information from various tutorials and forums.  The way I usually work in a situation like this is to cut and paste text and images from websites and compile a word document of all the relevant information found.  So when working on the project I can easily refer back.  This could be made a lot easier through an application that would allow you to select any information from a website, and compile it in to the application.  It would then automatically track what web page it had come from and what search term found it.

Within the application’s compilation you could customise the information to appear in any way.  So for my drawing application search I would have a boxes for text, ActionScript code, images and flash applications.

These boxes would be movable, so they could be resized or reorganised to suit however the user wanted to view them.  It could just be a list of the information saved from each webpage visited in a session, or by search term.  However tagging would allow for more specific compilations.  For my project I might have tagged some information as ‘line drawing tool’.  I would then be able to view all the information I had found on that subject, regardless of what search term it had been accessed through.  Or I could choose to purely view the ActionScript coding I had found for creating a line drawing application.

Obviously the way the information was compiled would depend on the subject matter.  So the application would be completely customisable.

This overall idea could be taken one stage further with people’s searches and compilations being accessible to others.  Before trawling through vast pages of irrelevant information, you could look through other people’s searches to find what they had found useful enough to save.  And look at the sections of information they took from the webpage, rather than reading the whole thing yourself.  You would be able to search through their search terms, tags and within the actual text they had selected.  This would make searching for information a lot more specific for very particular subjects.

Another problem it might solve is I often don’t know the technical name of what I want to do, so I know what I want to find, but don’t know what search term to type in.  This means I have to fish around for a while until I find what I’m looking for.  If you were searching through other people’s search terms, rather than what the website called it, it might make it easier to get straight to the information.

Whether this would breach copyright issues I am unsure.  No information would be passed off as the searcher’s own, and the original websites the information came from would be easily accessible and quoted.

Matt Cooper, senior designer at AIG, is a regular contributor to the interactive community Dynamo London.  He posted up a list of predictions for 2009 which I found quite inspirational.  Read the full post here.

-    Apple will release some sort of ‘Touchscreen-Netbook-Newton-Big iPhone-Thing’

Matt suggested it will be a combination of an A5 sized iPhone device with a MacBook - Nano.  The software would be managed through the app store, or wirelessly from another computer (as in the MacBook Air).

He also predicted it would be cheap, although I am not sure I agree with that, unless they initially sell it at a massive loss.

On a similar note, I have also recently read about the likelihood of a mass emergence of ‘empty’ phones or devices that you download software on to, to suit individual needs.

-    The commercialisation of Wikipedia

Wikipedia is a fantastic resource, that has developed in to a complex mass of information.  But I think that a lot more could be made of it.

If it was commercialised it would undoubtedly improve its operating system and overall design, but it sparks the eternal question - would the improvements out-weigh the advertising and biased commercial influence?

-    Digital paper

Matt predicted digital paper will come and go.  This may indicate a lack of experience on my part in comparison to Matt, but I think it could revolutionise the online experience, to make it less ‘online’.  I think it could make the internet a much more integral part of our lives, a step further than the MacBook Air.

Online information could be viewed on the ‘paper’ with a wireless connection to a computer, or device that can connect to the internet.  The keyboard could be abandoned through a touch screen that would allow users to write search terms (or whatever) directly on to the digital paper.