Internet on desktop
This post is part of a global idea that aims to integrate Internet into KDE workspace (See here)

As said on the main topic, my dream is to get information from the internet without opening a browser. While the first two parts lay the basis, this part, and the following one, describes what to provide to reach this goal. In this part, I will deal about media stream and information, but PIM (actually Social + PIM = people) is in described the next part.

In order to get most of the information / data / media from the internet, we have to see what we do on the internet. I don't know the habits of everybody, so I will only describes my habits, those of a student in master. Feel free to post and make this idea more complete by adding what you do on the internet and want to do without opening a browser.

1. Search
While opening a browser, I always land on google. I also use firefox's awesome bar to search (actually that can also be done with konqueror: gg = google etc.) With this idea of blurring data from the internet and local data, we can imagine that searching operation can take in account both local files and remote websites. If, for example, I'm searching a piece of data but I forget that I have already downloaded it, in the search results, I might find that I already downloaded it and then do not download it a second time.

If KRunner can be extended to add support of google / bing / baidu / yandex / other search engines, it might be very useful. Or actually, we might need a KRunner to run applications, and a KSearcher to search from data, because KRunner do too much things currently and sometimes list too much results.

While KRunner or KSearcher is used to search information on wikipedia or wolfram alpha, it might be enough to display the result page as in amarok, in a special widget, instead of opening a browser.

2. Media (Pictures / Videos / Music)
Let's start with pictures. Sometimes, I need to show pictures to family / friends. But I do not remember if I uploaded it to flickr and deleted it (because of my HDD running out of space) or not. Then I open digikam / gwenview, and start browsing. If these applications can aggregate photos from the internet and download them on the go, I will have the illusion of only browsing local files, so I do not have to remember where all my photos are stored, if they are on the cloud, on the computer.

For videos, I appreciate Minitube as it ressemble much to dragon / VLC, but for youtube. What I dream of is a dragon / VLC that is able to read videos from local files and internet stream. For music, the same principle applies, and the best example is tomahawk with it's resolvers for online music.

If Phonon can get an ability of playing audio / video stream from the internet, and a support API to interact with youtube / dailymotion / deezer / grooveshark, then all audio / video players might inherit from these features, making creation of new applications (I'm thinking of Plasma Media center) integrating these features easily. For photos, maybe a KIO that interacts with flickr or picasa will be enough.

3. News stream
I like to read news. But RSS is not enough for me, because of some websites providing only a small portion of the article in the RSS, with a link to the original article. I really appreciate an app that is able to display not only RSS, but the article. In order to have this kind of reader, Akregator have to gain the ability to parse websites and extract only the relevant article.