George gave a preview of his UIST98 paper on Data Mountain . This is a system Microsoft Research has develop that provides a spatial filing system for web favorites (bookmarks). The system provides a generic 3d space in which users can place thumbnail images of web pages for which they wish to keep references. The system provides shadows, occlusions, tooltips, audio, zooming, etc. Users place the thumbnails anywhere they wish and the other images adjust as you move around to make room. Tests showed that the Data Mountain was 26% faster on retrieval than using the usual Favorites menus. A 2x speedup was seen for implicit queries (find related pages already filed). Given that a bookmarked page is usually referenced 3-5 times, this system could increase a web users productivity.
UIST’98 paper is online in the ACM Digital Library: http://www.acm.org/pubs/citations/proceedings/uist/288392/p153-robertson