The idea of annotating the Web has been around for a long time. It goes back to a failed Web 1.0 startup called Third Voice. Today there are a handful of Web startups (Diigo, Fleck, Stickis, ShiftSpace, TrailFire) that let you mark up any Web page by adding virtual sticky notes or comments in a sidebar. One of these, ActiveWeave, had to reboot as BlogRover and eventually sold itself to BuzzLogic.
Now, a new startup that officially launches today, Reframe It, is trying its hand at the same game. The company has raised $700,000 from AD Gilhart & Co., and it boasts an impressive advisory board which includes Esther Dyson, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Howard Rheingold. But it is not clear how Reframe It will distinguish itself from the other Web annotation startups that have so far failed to spark a lot of interest among users.
Reframe It is a browser plug-in for Firefox or Internet Explorer that lets you highlight passages of text on a Web page and add your own comments in a side pane. Comment can be private, public, or visible only to certain groups. Anyone with the Reframe It plug-in can then see those comments in their side pane as they browse the Web. Reframe It also has a Twitter-like social feature that lets you follow other people’s comments, as well as comments within groups. You can follow these comments in an RSS feed, which you can track in your blog reader or other services such as FriendFeed. To help get you started, Reframe It allows you to import your contacts from Gmail, Facebook, and (soon) LinkedIn and other services. → Read More
Keeping up with your favorite blogs can be somewhat of a chore. Robert Scoble talks about following over 700 feeds each day. But if you find that many feeds overwhelming, limiting yourself to a few blogs seems like the only option. Activeweave, however, has a solution. Instead of searching your feed for relevant content, their Blogrovr browser plugin serves you blog posts related to the content you’re viewing. SphereIt has a similar technology that embedded with posts, like on this blog. The plugin was spun off from an earlier project from Activeweave called Stickis. The posts are taken from your favorite blogs and populate a sidebar in your browser. Today they released a new version of the plugin with an improved algorithm, personalized suggestions, and Google reader integration. Blogrovr’s updated algorithm has significantly improved the quality and number of stories that show up. Their algorithm pulls in stories from blogs on my OPML feed and seems pretty on target. A look at one of the recent blog posts on the Skype outage shows how I get results related to Skype and the outage, even though there are not direct links between the stories. It’s not a destination like Techmeme for the tech blogosphere, but Blogrovr can scale to a large variety of blog topics. The new version also supports blog discovery by recommending new blog posts that are highly related to what you’re reading, even if they’re not on your feed list. The best feature enhancement has been the Google reader integration. Blogrovr now delivers blog posts related to what post you’re reading in Google reader, in real time. It’s still a bit slow in refreshing content, but a useful companion for Google reader. → Read More
In 1999, Eng-Sion Tan and two friends launched Third Voice, a browser plugin that would let anyone make annotations on webpages. The intent was to encourage freer speech on the internet, but many slammed it as “Web Graffiti.” The company eventually shut down. The idea of web page annotation didn’t die with Third Voice, though. New services, each with unique features, have carried on. Diigo A must have for researchers Diigo is a research tool that lets you share bookmarks and annotations on web pages using a browser plugin or bookmarklet. Notes are anchored to highlighted text and bookmarks save a cached copy of the site. Diigo will also let you save to multiple other bookmarking services (all the big ones) and email your annotated pages to friends who don’t have the plugin. We covered Diigo earlier. Diigo has some advanced search functionality built in as well. With Diigo, you can search for the highlighted words on the web with any of four search engines, social bookmarking systems, on blogs, within the current site, amongst inbound links, and seven different content verticals (TV, stock sites, etc.). Diigo also lets you post links to your blog through posts, or a “linkroll” widget listing your most recent annotations. Fleck Bare bones Fleck is the most basic of the annotation services, letting you simply post public or private text notes on a page. Notes can be posted by using a browser plugin or by ajax when Fleck feeds web pages through its servers and adds the necessary annotation code. Permalinks to annotated pages can be emailed to friends and posted to blogs. We covered their launch previously and expect the company to be rolling out more features. ShiftSpace Have your way with any webpage ShiftSpace is an opensource browser plugin (FF only) being developed by NYU’s Interactive Telecommunication Program and is pretty close to internet graffiti. The plugin allows their users to annotate and remix a website saving it as a communally editable alternate version revealed in your browser by pressing Shift + Space. ShiftSpace allows users to leave notes, highlight text, change images, and edit the page source. It kind of reminds me of the web page analysis plugin Firebug, which allows you to carry out live edits of any web page. For web surfers with the plugin, modified pages are marked with a small ShiftSpace icon (§) in the bottom left → Read More
Stickis, which we covered briefly back in October last year is launching its service this afternoon. Stickis, at first glance is a FireFox and Internet Explorer plugin much like other web annotation programs, such as Fleck, Diigo, and Trailfire. Stickis does do the webpage “sticky note” annotation of these programs. However, Stickis is not just about marking up a single page. It is about creating and subscribing to “channels” of these notes and other data sources. The channels can consist of notes left by people, RSS feeds (blogs), and even specialized data channels for web services such as OpenTable or Yelp. When you subscribe to a channel, be it another user’s “sticky notes” or Yelp reviews, that channel is added to your network and begins to populate, in reverse chronological order, a collapsible tray that’s tucked away on the side of your browser screen. Then, when you visit a page, such as TechCrunch, that tray is populated with summaries of any related notes or reviews from you network through an analysis of the url and tags of your current page and those included in the note. One click on a summary brings up the sticky note. Stickis does a deeper analysis for the web service channels such as OpenTable and Yelp, which makes it possible for a restaurant’s Yelp review and OpenTable reservation search widget to pop up in my tray when I go a page linking to a restaurant. I believe this contextual method makes it a much more consumable service than others, which require you actively seek out information by visiting an annotated page. It also allows for greater control of what data you see because of the subscription based method. Creating notes is done with a fairly robust WISIWYG editor, allowing users to style text and backgrounds, as well as embed photos and movies by drag and drop. This makes it very easy to go through Flickr and start commenting away. Without the plugin installed users are still treated to a proxied version of the site with an AJAX version of the Stickis layered on top like this. A note or several notes can be replied to and even leave trackbacks when they link to blogs, because your personal Stickis channel page is in fact a personal blog where notes are stored as taggble posts. This can also be changed to post to a personal blog instead. → Read More
In 1999 Eng-Sion Tan launched a company called Third Voice, a browser plug-in that created a sidebar on web pages and allowed surfers to annotate the page by adding their comments. The service quickly devolved into web graffiti and shut it’s doors two years later. Even though Third Voice is gone, the idea had some value. And soon Jean Sini and Marc Meyer will be launching something that has some of the characteristics of Third Voice, but which will not have the same graffiti result. They call it Stickis. Stickis is still in private alpha. I don’t have credentials yet (they are keeping it very quiet and don’t want screen shots on the web), but Marc and Jean came by last week to give me a peak at the service. You can request an alpha invitation on their home page. To be honest, it took me a while to get it. The reason: they’ve built a platform that has at least two or three killer applications and I saw so much in so short a time that I was getting lost. I slowed things down by asking dumb questions and, in the process became pretty fired up about stickis in general. Once you are registered, you can add a “sticki” to any web page with your notes, which can be in the form of text or dragged in images. Every time you return to that page you can pull up your sticki. For lots of sites that I interact with, the ability to keep these notes is very interesting. Notes can be shared with friends or kept private. You can also subscribe to feeds from other sites, and if those feeds have linked to the current site you are visiting that content will also appear in the stickis. For instance, If you were to go to the Sticki site, and you had subscribed to the TechCrunch feed, you would see this post included in the sticki. They’ve also included a master page to manage the content you’ve distributed on various pages, and add feeds and friend’s content. Marc and Jean are in the process of raising an angel round – everything to date has been created on their own dime and with their own time. They’ve been working on it for about a year. → Read More
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