A long time ago, in 1946, the Atlantic Monthly carried a feature by Vannevar Bush entitled "As We May Think". This inspirational article foresaw a world in which our information sources were all linked and on tap at all times. It was a marvellous piece of thinking and many, many, software developers were moved to implement some, at least, of the functionality. If a product contains hyperlinks then you could probably follow the inspiration trail all the way back to 1946.
Now 'trails', as it happens, is one of those Bush ideas that has never caught on in the mass market. The idea is that you can capture a sequence of activities, save it and share it with others. Of course, educational programs and workflow applications already do something like this, but they are too heavyweight for ordinary users.
Now, thanks to a free (for non-commercial use) service from Trailfire, you can save your trails as you navigate the web. You don't have to capture every page you visit but you could get people to follow your thoughts by saving the URL of each page of interest and any annotations (collectively called a 'mark' in the TrailFire vernacular) you might wish to make. These notes can be text, restricted html or multimedia. The whole sequence is held as a named trail with a URL that you can publish on your blog or website.
It's a new, and very useful, dimension to web navigation.
Here's one I prepared earlier. Just click on 'David's activities' to trundle around my various web presences. Or not.
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