The Greasemokey Firefox extension allows user defined scripts to augment web pages with additional content. I wonder whether a useful extension would be to search a web page for links to delicious, perhaps embedded in a tag with a particular class (=linkroll) and augment the page with a a javascript include to pull the page in, or perhaps an iframe containing a view of the links? Alternatively, it may be possible to use a Javascript bookmarklet to achieve a similar end? What this tool would allow is for the user to decide whether or not to reveal an embedded view of the linkroll, given a delicious url? This idea of *users* being able to augment and exploit pages particularly appeals to me (e.g. most recently with the idea of searchlinks and pagelink searches.)

A few quick thoughts on thee design of Plone product and customisations to make this technique even easier to use, moreefficient and more flexible:

Plone 'My Content Outside' product

Give the use access to an in-portal interface for specifying an RSS feed from the well-known services ( or entering an RSS url ) amd setting some display parameters and update-frequency. This creates an RSS-consuming object ( like CMFSin and KNSin do, but placelessly unlike KNSin and with an enduser-interface unlike CMFSin). This would allow the portal to manage the fetching of the data from the feed's source at sensible intervals. It also registers the availability of that feed for use by that user or all users or a group of users.

kupu toolbar options to choose a 'my content outside' feed or make a new one

Customise kupu to allow user to insert one of these within their own content during WYSIWYG editing. This would obviate the need for endusers to edit raw HTML, and would radically cut down the number of steps required.

Then, we can avoid the glitchiness of having the rest of thte document wait for some external content to be fetched, by either embedding the live content into the actual page content ( serverside include ) or making a more sophisticated AJAXian javascript technique which inserts a placeholder during pageload and stuff the live data into that after the rest of the page has loaded.

None of the above would be hard to do, though there would be a few days' worth of refining entailed as soon as users got hold of it in anger... Customising kupu would introduce maintenance issues, sadly, but the kupu developers have done it right and made a way to plug-in extra editing services. Th user-interface for specifying a feed from flickr etc could take a bit of time to get right, but could be added and improved incrementally.

Watch this blog anbd KNotations later in November 2005 for some fleshing out of these issues.

Oh - and in case this isn't obvious: parts of the 'My Content Outside' interfaces are also needed for knotes member-profiles - in fact Steve has already made some progress towards those as part of our profile work.