Ever have one of those ideas which just pop into your head and you need to get it down right away. It might sound stupid later on and not quite thought through but that is the nature of quick thoughts and some of them turn around and become the seed to bigger things. When I took a small business course once I was told to always carry a pen and paper to jot down ideas that came, the instant they came. It was said that you never know when one of those ideas will launch your next new business. These days I have a syndicated blog so I can annoy or perhaps touch off light bulbs is others with my live notepad.

It struck me while I was on the T going to work this morning. I was reading the Bill Bryson book A Short History of Nearly Everything. It is a sort of spoof of Stephen Hawking A Brief History of Time but actually ends up being a very well researched book that can be referenced if one were to do a report on the birth of modern day scientific thought. The Bill Bryson whit shows it head mostly in revealing the more salacious details of how scientists are accredited with discoveries.

In any case I though much of this book would be great to mark up so I could later quickly reference which scientists did what for general trivia knowledge and if any day I wanted a quick analogy. Then I got to work where someone brought up evince getting onto the OLPC builds and I quickly remembered part of the projects goal was to provide ebook functionality. The idea then struck me, what if I was reading the Bill Bryson book as an ebook? I could go into something like Tomboy and make notes to pages in the book. But what if we were to define an annotation interface which Tomboy or a similar app could export? Imagine being able to highlight a section on the ebook and instantly get a note which referenced the page number and selection and then putting even more tomboy links in. Pretty soon you would have a mindmap of thoughts and even references to other ebooks and pages in the same ebook. Reports would practically write themselves and attribution and bibliographies would be instantly put together. I remember spending just as long as it took to write my papers, putting together a comprehensive bibliography. Applications would also be free to present the notes in a more orderly fassion then is now possible with Tomboy since I envision that attaching metadata would be part of the interface. Tools could be created to construct time lines and sort out the notes into more constructive and ordered forms.

In any case, there is my idea. Now run with it ;)

[read this post in: ar de es fr it ja ko pt ru zh-CN ]