We talked about Chapter 2 of Manovich in my Writing for New Media class Tuesday, and we tried to brainstorm some new interface metaphors for applications or operating systems. Other than the spatial metaphor, ala Matteo Ricci, we didn't have a lot of luck trying to suggest new interfaces. It's hard to get to the innovation side of the "consistency-innovation" combo.

So I thought I'd brainstorm some of my daily interactions that could yield interesting metaphors:

• Walking the dog. When you walk your dog, your dog is out and about, it visits the places it's interested in, leaves notes (minor and substantial), and greets other dogs. Translation: what about a web-browsing interface that allowed/kept track of current connections ala the "logged in" panel in drupal? However, it would use some sort of pop-up to allow you and the other users to interact immediately. The virtual "sniff."
• An audio tour, as at a museum. You could use a popup window that narrates (audibly) pages as you browse. This could also be understood as the virtual director's commentary.
• Library stacks. A mighty AI engine would be used to categorize websites as you view them. While their links would come into play, the sites in "stacks" next to one another would be by whatever organizing principle you wanted to see. Similar to the division of search results on Clusty. An adjustable range would allow for a minimum of one website on each side, up to many websites. Perhaps you could even click a button to close the current website and just display the surrounding stack. Here's what I'm imagining:
  
  View image in big pop-up