Collaborative Page Annotation Tools
April 4, 2007 by Trent Adams
I’ve dabled with just about all the major collaborative bookmarking/tagging/link-sharing tools around. I put del.icio.us, Digg, Reddit, Technorati, etc. There are, of course, strengths and weaknesses of each one. The trick for me has been to integrate my use of them into my daily work stream.
Enter my new favorite class of tool: in-situ collaborative page annotation. I have no idea what others are calling them, but there ya’ go. I’m sure someone has come up with a clever Web 2.0 term, especially since mine is way too long.
Basically, these tools enable me to quickly and easily add my own notes to a page while reading it. The faster the tool works with only a few key clicks earns high marks in my book. Further, the more tracking / reporting / sharing functionality they have the better. For example, immediately after highlighting the pages I like to see the ability to immediately post my notes as a blog entry or otherise set it to track the page for changes.
The two tools that have floated to the top for me are Fleck and Diigo. My personal opinion having used both for a couple weeks now is that Diigo wins. While both have largely the same feature set, the RIA UI of Diigo really keeps me moving without waiting for page redraws. Further, they’re style guides associated with reading annotations (within their site, in a cross-post to a blog, or forwarded via email) are incredibly well designed.
The only downside I’ve found with Diigo so far is that it doesn’t automaticlly pick up the tags associated with the pages. It’d be a great feaure if they took a best guess based on the meta keywords in the header and let you modify them. Right now, though, it pre-populates the “tags” field with “no-tags” (and changing them requires a bit too many key clicks for my tastes).
As a side note, LibraryThing does a fantastic job of empowering the user to quickly and easily add tags to books in your library. Talk about great human factors (though minimal pretty pictures in their GUI)… in fact I’ll probably spend some time chatting that site up some time soon.
