invisible data storage

I'm far more involved in customizing, maintaining, and learning more about my software than most people, but I got a glimpse of the casual user's experience today when I briefly thought firefox was doing more than I knew it could.
I had to reinstall my operating system a couple of times in the past few months, so I expect most of my browsing history to be missing - but when was searching for some PHP programming help, I saw a purple link that I was sure I hadn't visited in over a year. While I remembered fairly quickly that I had visited it more recently, I was thrilled by the thought that FF had backed up my history online.
Now ordinarily I'd be pissed that they were invading my privacy this way (in fact I generally download and store on my own hard drive most of the gmail/gdocs/calendar data I wouldn't want to become part of the public record) - but for this functionality I would be thrilled for Mozilla to track my browsing history and help me either find or avoid the sources I've used before, depending on my intent.
I think the primary difference is that I have a model for my personal data in calendars, documents, and email. I've had those totally under my control, and I know all the details of what it looks like and what's in it. But with browsing history, I have no concept of the database structure, the kinds of details that are involved (and which are left out), nor how/when/where I would use that data in any other context. I think this is what keeps me from being upset about it: it doesn't really seem like *my* data, and almost not like anything at all - thus if Mozilla can turn it into any sort of insight at all for me, I feel like I'm getting that for free!

references & bibliography

a friend of mine - an academic historian - once mentioned that there is software specifically for tracking sources, quotes, and footnotes while you're composing a paper, and printing out a properly linked and formatted bibliography. (this is probably hidden somewhere in one of msword's sub-sub-submenus)
For years I've been occasionally daydreaming about displaying a universal bibliography in the form of a network graph (I've never gotten very far because I can't decide whether to have the links show explicit references, quotations/stealing of text or phrases, stylistic influences, shared subject matter...) that connects all the books in the western cannon. But it would be far simpler to perform this operation for a relatively finite set of books like the bibliography for a single paper.
The program could draw from a database that already lists all the references in the bibliography of published books, or rely on the user to scan in and OCR a few pages from each of the books. The resulting web would give a quick visual sense of how broadly the writer has researched or what state the field is in - if all the references are highly interconnected, it's a well-defined field and/or the writer hasn't performed any great synthesis, while an unconnected graph would indicate original research and new insights (assuming the database the links are drawn from is complete and accurate).

video games as art

Great article in the NYT today - http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/20/business/20unbox.html?hpw - about where video games are and are going.

One particularly salient point: where literature can pull you in (i.e. to make you feel sympathy, even empathy for horrible raskolnikov) video games go a step farther by literally making you complicit (you make all the detailed decisions about how to get those dead bodies across NYC)

Clearly there is a need for something to be done... too bad I'm focusing on a different sort of interaction design.