Washington-based Bordee is preparing to launch a new free service, built with Ruby on Rails, that lets anyone create a topic-specific message board for any domain name. Bordee isn’t a new idea – there are lots of message board services out there. Google, Yahoo, Ezboard, Groupee and others have competing products. But I like the way Bordee is tweaking the message idea to create discussion groups for any website. it’s a good Saturday afternoon post.

The best way to access Bordee will be via a plugin for Firefox or IE (the site is pre-launch and the Firefox plugin link is currently dead, so I haven’t tested this). If you are on a website with a Bordee discussion board a button on the plugin will light up. You can also use the plugin to create a message board for that website. The hierarchy is fairly straightforward – there can be only one top level message board for any domain, and one sub-board for each page on the domain. Any number of topic specific boards can be created under these.

The main reason I think this is interesting is that it creates a sort of “shadow” web with user generated content outside of the control of the website itself but associated with it. The browser plugin ties it all together. Lots of sites are experimenting in this area, including Shadows (our posts on Shadows are here) and others.