highlights and intext comments for the web
.. As a blogger, I have always wanted a tool to let users highlight text and leave comments. It is so easy to set up and I was surprised by the sheer amount of quality content generated by my readers.I can easily moderate comments. The filter feature is so powerful that only “helpful” comments get displayed. Pre-moderation turns off all comments until they are approved by a moderator. I can also pin the best comments so everyone sees it. I don’t lose any control over my blog.
Annotation is now a web standard
While many applications, from PDF readers and Google Docs to the Kindle, support some kind of annotation functionality, what the W3C formalized yesterday is fundamentally different. The W3C architecture provides for a model where annotations live separately from documents and are reunited and reanchored in real-time whenever the relevant document is present. The benefit of this is that annotations now come under the control and election of the user, rather than at the sole discretion of the publisher.
Whereas previously annotation was likely a solitary act when implemented in a native app, or the most public act when it took place in a Disqus or Livefyre comment widget, web annotations will allow users to form communities freely, and those communities can extend across any internet-connected document, whether in HTML, PDF, EPUB, or other formats.
Fermat’s Library: annotated academic papers
Fermat’s Library is a platform for illuminating academic papers. Just as Pierre de Fermat scribbled his famous last theorem in the margins, professional scientists, academics and citizen scientists can annotate equations, figures and ideas and also write in the margins. Every week we send you a new paper annotated by the community.
Web annotation
A web annotation is an online annotation associated with a web resource, typically a web page. With a Web annotation system, a user can add, modify or remove information from a Web resource without modifying the resource itself. The annotations can be thought of as a layer on top of the existing resource, and this annotation layer is usually visible to other users who share the same annotation system. In such cases, the web annotation tool is a type of social software tool.