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Ask HN: is web highlighting service topical today?
Idea of one service blowing my mind last year: to create a service, which allows to highlight main ideas in web articles and shadow noise information.
Imagine two markers, green and gray, which you use to mark articles everywhere on the web. And your markings visible to all users of service (unregistered even).
Social highlighting, meta-wiki over Internet.
My fears:
- there were many highlighting services before (shiftspace, webnotes.net) and only Diigo is alive now. BUT: all of them is person centered, when goal of my service is to allow users to speed read the web (and help other users to do it)
- service will be unpopular because people don't like to install extensions, user.js, etc. I don't know any top service, based on extensions.
- people don't need it because most of them prefer to watch and listen instead of read.
- there aren't easy monetization way of such service.
What do you think about vitality of such service?
- polyfractal 15y agoJust a few thoughts: -A lot of content on the web is already chunked into readable, bite-sized pieces since people don't like reading big paragraphs. Do we need to distill those down even further? -How do you deal with differing opinions on what is and isn't important to highlight? If I highlight the first sentence and you shadow it, what does a third reader see? -Maybe it is just me, but I personally hate all websites that hyperlink or markup words (even if they are trying to be useful). It makes the text obnoxious to read. -How is this better than me just skimming the text myself? -I could see an annotation feature being useful, perhaps allow comments on the annotations to create discussions?
- smlwry 15y ago1. A lot chunked, a lot - not. 2. It will be based on statistics. Same way as it works on Digg, etc. With a karma, with a minimal number of votes (vote=mark) to show mark to everybody. The last thing was implemented in Kindle readers (255 people marked this fragment). 3. - 4. So - you will be perfect marker in this service :) It's like in Wikipedia: low percent of editors is creating the content. 5. It's a good idea, but it's not so useful, as to provide people an abstract of an article. It can be the minor feature, as many others (like a social spellcheck, for example).