ReferTree
I don’t know when or why I started reading David Hepworth’s blog.
But I’m glad I did.
He writes with the tone of a man that’s very well read. To quasi-paraphrase Bruce Springsteen, you could probably learn more from David Hepworth in ten visits to the pub than you ever learned in school. Not in a Johnny Ball Reveals All kind of way. More a well-rounded and worldly type of learning.
Now, as I mentioned, I don’t know when or why I started reading David Hepworth’s blog.
And this got me thinking.
Who was that referrer? Who was the person that pointed me in the direction of this terrific little blog? And have they got any more good suggestions for me?
But I don’t know. I don’t know where or when I made the clickthrough.
I could sift through my browsing history, but I spend half my life on the internet and frankly don’t have the time or the inclination to do that much sifting.
So I suggest a Firefox extension that records which site referred me to a particular site for the first time. I’m no programmer, so wouldn’t know where to start, but I’m sure there’s some clever bod out there that could create something to fit the bill.
I spoke about this with James and he suggested going a few steps further and plotting some kind of hierarchical tree of referring sites. I guess Google would come out top (through search). But as soon as you take Google out of the loop, it’d be interesting to see which sites have come portals to lots of interesting information on the web. Let’s call it ReferTree. (An ounce of research shows there’s already a social network called this, but meh.)
Maybe you could opt to share this information, too. So lots and lots of data could be crunched and more charts plotted. That’d be interesting.
Well, I think so anyway.