It is the web, you know.


Sometimes I find myself so involved in trying to find the right tool for me, that I forget that I don't only need, or want, to make and find my own notes. We're dealing with the World Wide Web, after all, and I thus want to find the notes that other people have jotted down as well. If someone has yelled out "how true" to a particular statement on a page he or she reads, I want to hear that remark if and when I visit that same page. Tools of this sort are, more or less, available. Talkbacks permit people to leave a wide variety of comments, we can view the bookmarks that people put online, and Furl lets us create publicly accessible links to pages we find interesting and worthwhile, while also adding comments to these - an important step in the right direction. Sadly, however, with most of the tools I've found and tried, I discover that, as is often the case with marginalia in books, I find myself asking why I went through all the trouble to read that.



Go to: In the margins of cyberspace.