Hunting The Muse

Two Utilities I Wish I Had

There are two utilities I can think of offhand which I would think would help political webloggers (most webloggers, actually) immensely.

• Search your own browsing history. What if you don't want to search all of google, but want to find that article that you saw a few days ago? There should be a better way to restrict your search to your own browsing history. And it would be better if it could outlive the lifespan of your cache.
• Archiving articles. So, you find an awesome publicly available article. And you link to it. But then the owner of the article deletes it, or (more likely in political weblogging) modifies it. It would be better to be able to freeze it at link time, to be offloaded and stored onto some external service. Fair use.

What would be cooler is to combined the two into an offsite service. Imagine this. A plugin for your browser with an encrypted key. Your browser would have a plugin that would watch your browsing traffic and report your browsing history (private and encrypted) to this offsite service.

The pages would be frozen on this service, like a wayback machine. But each user account would have a history stored of the URLs and the timestamp of that page. Aagin, that history would be private and not able to be aggregated. Each user could search among their own history.

Your blogging software would also have a plugin for it, so when you linked to a page, it would make sure to generate a public link to that cached page that people could access if the source page disappeared.

This would be a perfect service for google to invent. They're already caching the pages.