@Ray: I think that’s part of what I meant by proposing “stateful” bookmarks… taking book-based bookmarks one step further and helping you get right back to what you were reading before… but applying this to digital media. …which is also what Sean talked about!

all we’ve done with bookmarks over the years is to extend the real-world metaphor into the ‘net. historically speaking, it was for a good reason. *everyone* uses a paper bookmark or folds a book’s page for future retrieval. and when we do so, we consciously recognize that we’ll have to backtrack from that generally framed coordinate in order to regain our “place” in the read.

we’re moving into the brave new world of web 2.0, where we’re comfortable making more concious attempts to serve early adopters (and the full-set of explicit tasks behind the goal-directed, human interaction with the interface), so as you so aptly point out, we need to think progressively.

so… in the real-world, are we (generally speaking) taking the time to record a note of sorts into the corner of that folded page or bookmark, reminding us about what we were thinking about at the time we dropped off from a read? no, it’s too much cognitive dissonance to bother with in the first place, so we all drop back a page to overlap and re-enter. but could that concept somehow be managed via technology (labels specifically)? possibly. would it only be more helpful if the user digested the entire object previously, as opposed to picking back up in the middle of a post or video? possibly.

i tried to hop over to the description of Places at moziilla, but the page is down. it sounds like you’re heading in a really smart direction, chris.

The other thing that I’d like to have are pages that scroll uniformly so that it is easy to find your place after going to the next screen and provide enough context that you can verify your position. If you can’t see the last sentence you read, there is no way of know you scrolled the correct amount, but if my last line is some place in the middle of the page, and it takes me a while to find it, I am distracted from what I am reading.