I recently had the opportunity to think about the future of the browser. It was pointed out that presuming it should be a browser was limiting, and so the term user-agent was substituted. What does that mean? It refers to the means by which humans interact with the data, tools and experiences available to them via the internet.

One of the problems with promoting linked open data on the web is the "what's in it for me" question. Most people understand the value of sharing, but most people are too impatient to wait for shared data - of interest to them - to show up to receive value-in-kind. This is not particularly motivating for putting in even the smallest effort at formatting data in a re-usable way. We are a society that wants instant gratification. Frustrating, but all too often it is the case.

As for myself, I want my user-agent to be a memory palace. For a couple of years now I've been poking at the idea of a semantic memory palace. Why? It benefits me and those I share my data with. It helps me to become a more organized, more efficient and more astute person. I can gather data of interest, as I find it, organize it in a way that I personally can use it, and share my tags, provenance information and mashups with whomever I wish. I can use it to learn and re-enforce the memory palace in my head. I can use it, as the Roman orators did, to help deliver more compelling presentations. I can use it in reports, in games, in visualizations. I can learn about the differences between how I think about the world, and how others do; improving my ability to communicate through understanding, opening my mind to new ideas and possibilities thanks to diversity of thought. Simply put, I can improve my memory; halt and hopefully reverse the decay that began when my kids came along!

What is a memory palace? It's a technique for remembering things better, by using visualizations and mnemonic devices. (If you want an excellent study on the topic, check out Frances Yates' book Art of Memory.) First, you choose a "palace" - a home for your memories. It can be a real or imagined, but should be a place you know well. You "place" things to remember in the rooms of your palace, and as you walk from room to room you can collect them in the order you want to remember them in. So, let's say you have a list of groceries - bread, butter, milk - and your palace is your childhood home. At your childhood home, you always entered the side door through a porch, and then into a kitchen, which led into a family room. You could place your grocery list like this: the bread in the porch, the butter in the kitchen, the milk in the family room. Rules for creating palaces can be found by searching for articles on the topic "method of loci." Next you can create a stable list of visualizations for yourself that represent letters and numbers. The image of an apple to represent "A," the image or a bird to represent "B," or a line, vesica piscis, triangle, square etc. to represent the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4. Unusual combinations are more memorable as they invoke our emotions, so to help us remember our grocery list we might place the image of a bird, carrying a vesica piscis with its feet and clutching a stick of butter in its beak in our kitchen. This way we can remember we need two sticks of butter, and it's the second thing on our list. This is a gross oversimplification of the technique; hopefully you get the idea!

So what do I want my user-agent to do? I want to be able to set my own images - folk tag data in my [browser/repository] to one of these categories. I want to be able to drag and drop the data into a room in my palace, and create as many instances of my palace as I need. I want to be able to recall the data at any time, by palace, by room, by image. I want it to capture provenance data automatically (source, date/time). I want it to let me add keyword tags if I so desire, or choose a schema to add other kinds of data - say Dublin Core or FOAF, as needed. I want to tag with sounds - imagine if Shazam could also identify bird calls, or my friend's voices. I want to be able to very easily state that for me a block of red color means that I am tagging something as being 'energetic.' Eventually I'd love to be able to tag with smells as well; for now simply representing with text strings will have to do. My palettes of tags could easily become large; so a method for organizing, scanning/finding and shortcuts for applying oft-used ones would be needed. And I'd want each tag to be represented persistently, so the tool would need to be able to manage a namespace or integrate with one. I see bits and pieces of these capabilities all over the technology landscape: Zotero & Zotz, Shazam, SnapNow & Flickr, countless Firefox plugins. I've captured some of the crazier ideas Kevin and I have had in the post on multi-sensory tagging.

Of course I want my agent to do other more practical things! This is the one that I'm most passionate about at the moment. Now, if only I had learned to code... No matter, I'm working on formalizing my use cases and requirements notes. Maybe someone will build it someday!