Joel Liu's Library tagged annotation →  View Popular, Search in Google

We created MarkUp at Medium to help make the QA process better for sites we're working on. Grab the MarkUp bookmarklet, go to some page in your browser, then click it to draw on the page. Publish to make a link you can share.

We've tried similar tools like BounceApp, Notable, and Skitch. Everything else we found is screenshot-based or takes us out of the browser. We wanted something that felt quicker than screenshots and more integrated with the browsing experience.

Instead of taking a screenshot, MarkUp snapshots the DOM in the current page, strips the javascript, and overlays a transparent DIV to draw on. We used Raphael for the drawing tools. The server-side is Node.js/Express.

What do you think? It's in beta and we'll be adding more features, but we wanted to start getting feedback now.

Thanks

There is a 'no comment' on a very convenient application syncing the desktop with an iPad application functionality( for the express purpose of removing 5lbs of journal printouts in my backpack).

Is there, or will there be an API for enterprising users who want to home brew an application that syncs with Sente? I'm a CS major, and since iPad + Sente = Happy, I am desperate enough to write some crude personal app.

Hey Guys, We just updated iAnnotate!

Here’s a quick run through of a few changes:
 - A redesigned and streamlined interface
 - You can receive, modify and send annotated docs through email!
 - Transfer PDFs via iTunes USB
 - Download any PDF link with the integrated web browser
 - Share files with other apps.
 - A redesigned document finder now includes favorites, tag search, new/recent documents, and more.
 - Text annotation summaries are available to read and share.
 - Two finger scroll allows lets you scroll while editing
 - Many other minor interface improvements and bug fixes based on excellent user feedback!

We’d love to know what you think, and we’re super attentive to our forums if you have any questions at all.

Using these, apps can come up with interesting filters that increase relevance for my Twitter experience:

 
• Show me tweets from users above an influence-rank threshold
• Show me tweets from users who have at least x followers or x list memberships
• Show me tweets from a specific geo-location
• Only show me tweets that contain links or pics or videos
• There can be interesting mashups and visualizations based on such metadata.
 

As apparent from some examples from the top-of-my-head, there are lots of creative possibilities.

* Ok, great. How are we going to figure out what Joe Random's annotations 
actually mean? 

That's something we need to figure out as a community. But here is an early 
idea: People could add some agreed upon "meta-annotation" that points to 
something which *describes* the annotation or annotations that person is 
using. Think something sort of like XML DTD, though not necessarily machine 
readable. This meta annotation could point to a URL that simply has an HTML 
document that gives a description with some examples of the various 
annotations you're experimenting with or standardizing on. 

* Will it be in search? Streaming? Mobile? My toaster? 

We hope so! When we launch you will at minimum be able to attach annotations 
to a tweet and consume annotations from a tweet's payload via the REST API. 
Of course it would be awesome to be able to say to search or the streaming 
API, "give me all tweets with this namespace", or "give me all tweets with 
this namespace and key", or etc. We're working with the Search, Streaming 
and other teams to make all this happen. We can't promise it'll be ready by 
launch but we know it's killer and a must have and are trying to get it 
ready soon. 

Media attachments: The basic stuff. Labeling tweets that have links to photos or videos in them. Or sticking the links to the photos and videos in the metadata itself. Or tagging the content of the photos in the tweets.

Hashtags: Migrate them to the allotted space for metadata.

Reviews: Add one to five-star ratings to tweets.

Finance: Make it easier to follow stocks for spikes or sudden fluctuations with a special category of tweets. In fact, make a special type of price alert tweet for all sorts of goods and services like plane flights and oil.

Coupons: Make a special category of coupon tweets so you know when hamburgers are half off in the neighborhood. Location data would make this especially powerful.

Music: Mark all tweets that refer to songs. Create Twitter song charts that span different services like Blip.fm and Hype Machine. Generate playlists from Twitter. Granted, these ideas are already out there. But people might be hesitant to tweet their favorite songs for fear of spamming their followers. Tagging the tweets would allow people to opt-in to ‘music-related’ content from friends.

Location: Yes, there is already location metadata. But there are different ways of thinking about places outside of lat-long coordinates or place names from local listings. What about all tweets about parks? Or tweets about schools? Traffic tweets? Finally tagging all the tweets that are check-ins?

News: A news story’s dateline (when a location is written in all caps at the beginning of story) has been a key piece of metadata paired along with copy for more than a century in newspapers. Now it can be put into the metadata of a tweeted headline. This solves a big problem: media organizations often tweet the headlines of stories about topics like French politics or airplanes being grounded in Europe because of the Icelandic volcano eruption. But these tweets may not actually contain the words ‘FRANCE’ or ‘ICELAND’ or ‘EUROPE,’ so they won’t get picked up by a cursory search. One could also tag tweets that are about the same ongoing news story like ‘michael-jackson’ in the case of the pop singer’s death.

Send us your ideas for Firefox add-ons, preferably ones created with Jetpack, that can turn the web-browser into a platform for rich personal learning. You are not restricted to work on any particular type of application. Here are a few examples to get you started:

 
• Turn social bookmarking and page annotation into effective learning tools (for example by including peer-assessment features).
• Allow users to easily compile personal e-portfolios (for example, by combining their own works — photos, comments, articles—with testimonials others have written about them).
• Let the browser suggest relevant materials (for example, by automatically identifying additional articles based on what sites a person visit or which topics they search for).
• Support social learning communities (for example, by making it easy to find and connect with others who share similar learning interests).

I may use Diigo to replace the Ning network that I am using in the course this semester.  I’ve used Ning mainly as a location for students to post profiles that provide me with a little background about them as individuals.  I’ve also used Ning as a forum to host class discussions.  I could accomplish the same goals by requiring students to create a Diigo account and join a Diigo group for the course.  I’d also gain the ability to share lists or resources with students.  I have a couple of ideas for Diigo assignments.

 
• Students read and/or view an assigned web-based resource and make annotations guided by a set of reading questions/activities.  After making their own annotations, they will look to see their classmates’ annotations before participating in a discussion related to the readings.  I wonder how being able to see classmates’ thoughts as they read the same material might impact understanding of each others’ points of view during a class discussion.
• Students create their own resource lists as they work on their projects.  For example, a student working on creating an educational podcast may gather links to the examples that inspired her, the tools she used, and the guides and “how-tos” that helped her through the process.  The student would then share the resource list with the other class members.
• Students could have a discussion on tagging and evaluate the group’s use of tags.

Annotations are a broadly useful mechanism that can support a number of document and database management applications: 
• provide a trace of use 
• third party commentary 
• information sharing 
• information filtering 
• semantic labeling of document content 
• enhanced search 
  

But it continues to be hard to publish to the web. If better tools are provided to information consumers then readers will be able to add commentary, make new connections, interpret content, and otherwise promote an accretion of both structure and content on the web. This process will add new semantics to the web and this new information will be the source for new approaches to searching and filtering of information.