sean.blog

About 8 months ago I got hooked on using Diigo as a tool for storing bookmarks online.  It was Diigo’s ability to annotate web pages which got me interested in using the service.  Basically, Diigo lets you either highlight or add comments too pretty much any web page.  It works quite well, and I was hooked.  After a few months of using Diigo religiously though I started to dislike the service.  I think it was because some pages that required me to login didn’t save the annotations correctly or maybe that the amount of ads on the Diigo site increased, I am not really sure what it was, but I stopped "liking" Diigo.

Problem was that I was hooked on the annotation bit.  It is a really amazing thing to read an article, highlight the best parts, and then come back a week or a month later and immediately see what was most important in that article.  I started looking for a replacement. 

Google Notebook is a tool that immediately sprang to mind.  I already clip bits of articles I want to remember in a particular context to specific notebooks.  This works great for that purpose, but if I want to clip three or four paragraphs I end up with that many entries in the notebook.  I also don’t get to see my annotations on the page when I view them in Firefox.

I looked at a few other services (Fleck, Shiftspace), but none of them was replacing the nice features of Diigo.  I finally stumbled upon SharedCopy.  It is a very simple service that captures a copy of the web page you want to annotate, and allows you to highlight, comment and draw on the page.  It has some integration with Ma.gnolia and Delicious (but not currently with Diigo), as well as some other services.  Here is a sample of what the annotations look like, and they even offer this nice little embedded widget as well.

You can see that it has links to the exact location in the article where I highlighted the information, which I think is nice.  I actually bookmark the marked up page (as opposed to the original) in Delicious/Ma.gnolia so that I can get back to my annotations.  I am a little worried about the company going away, so I also subscribe to my feed in Google Reader which allows me to keep a copy of my annotations on the Google servers.  It also provides a very nice search of my annotated pages.  For example, I can search my SharedCopy items in Google Reader for Al Gore (which appears in my clipping above) and it finds it no problem.

I am pretty happy with the setup I have right now, using SharedCopy.  I am wondering though, is web annotation that important?  Do you annotate web pages?  There are quite a few services listed on the Web Annotation article in Wikipedia, have you tried any of them?