What an excellent question.

This blog is quite simply going to be the homepage of what I hope will end up being a very cool and useful Firefox extension. It’s the extension that I was going to make in 2004 when I got sidetracked by making Screengrab!. Screengrab was actually one very tiny component of this that ended up being so hard to do that I spent about a year getting it right. Some of that is because I didn’t really know what I was doing and some of that is because it is actually quite hard doing clever things with Firefox.

But I digress.

BookSmarts will initially be a much smarter bookmarks implementation than Firefox currently has. Essentially, it will analyse your usage patterns and have a constantly updated list of the places that you go to the most.

If it’s very clever it will be able to group them as portals (Slashdot & digg), or news sites (blogs, ArsTechnica).

It will also save a little picture of the site as it was when you last visited it.

That’s our mildly ambitious goal for the first real release.

The ultimate aim (and the full idea that I had back in early ‘04) was to create a replacement for bookmarks and history. A bookmark just represents a single item in your history and, rather than being static, it would give you a way to navigate that history. The history would be less linear, and more of a graph, showing all of the pages you went to from one single page, the backs and forwards, new tabs and windows and so on.

The even further aim I had from this was to, with user permission and ultimate security, create a server-side component that would receive updates of browser sessions in order to amalgamate data from all of the people using the extension. There would be a website attached that would be yet-another-news-site, but rather than having people nominate and vote for sites, it would show actual user preferences. And there would be NO COMMENTS (OMFG digg R0xz u loosr).

I’m actually convinced that this is Google’s plan with their synchronising extension, although I don’t think they’d make a news aggregator out of it somehow. Just more coal for the search boiler…

Anyway… come along. Let’s begin.