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Social Annotation I have just read about a company currently in private beta called Diigo, which is in the business of social annotation (SA). Apparently SA is a superset of social bookmarking or tagging, which is of course the piece de resistance of ‘Web 2.0′. The question is can SA be an even better route to getting aquired by MAGY? Don’t quite me on ‘MAGY’ though since I am not sure what order those names should go in… I had been thinking about SA for some time but did not have the time / resources to get anything together for public showing - but this might be a good reason to do so. Of course given my record with getting code up on my blog I won’t have a sample till next year this time. Anyhow, the possiblities for SA are much more attractive than social bookmarking in my mind. With social annotations (at least what I consider it to be) I can surf to any web page and place tagged sticky notes (private or public) in a browser agnostic fashion that will contain my comments and refer to a certain block in the web page DOM. Then I can go to some central place to view / oranize my comments and can also subscribe to RSS of other people’s comments on those pages or from particular people.

The main problem that I have with Diigo (from the looks of their Flash demo) is that I need to install their toolbar - yuck!

The useful part of these systems for end users is that they can tag particular bits of content on a page and find exactly what they were referring to with a tag. Then if you combine this idea with microformats and the Semantic Web you might really be cooking with something combustible like methane.

I have only used 1 product in this genre: Google Notebook. In my experience it integrates tightly with Firefox, has a right click contextual menu option, ability to publicize or privatize multiple notebooks, etc.

I use Google Notebook, which is essentially the same thing. It has really helped me and changed the way I browse.

Sometimes bookmarking something you want to reference later doesn't quite do the trick since the page might change or you just can't remember what it was you found so interesting.

Another proposal, from Dave Beckett (2006), is to make more use of the social context within which tags are created by separating the tool that creates the tags from the tool with which they are used. He also proposes that wiki pages should be created for individual tags which users could then add to/edit so that the wiki page, in effect, becomes the tag. The on-going process of refinement for each separate tag would form a kind of consensus as to the meaning of that tag and would also record the processes (the semantic path) by which the end result is being reached. This would, to take just one simple example, allow direct links to other language versions of the same tag.