annotation

Last week I had the opportunity to speak with Yaakov Sash, founder of New York-based JumpKnowledge (JK). JumpKnowledge is an annotation tool for the Web and from the demo it's pretty groovy. The initial launch was in May 2007 and there are some overviews here and here.

The idea with JK is simple: you can add your own thoughts an ideas (i.e. annotations) to any web page. JK saves a copy of the page and then allows you to begin annotating it as you like. There is a button for the Google toolbar and a Firefox plugin to make using JK easy.

Once you have completed your annotations, the system saves it for a week and provides you with a link that can be shared. In addition, the updated page can be shared on social networking tools and emailed as well.

Yaakov mentioned that he is contacting newspapers and magazines where the tool could be a huge hit. Imagine a team manager annotating a story from the New York Times and then sending it to his/her team rather than sending the story link plus an email pointing to several sections of the article. Or for a teacher/professor - this could be an excellent tool in the classroom.

My suggestion for Yaakov is to implement a public gallery of the pages created using JumpKnowledge. This could be a massive gallery and would allow each person to have their thoughts about an article or post. Similar to the new Google News tool.