I just stumbled upon the Online Journalism Blog. My entry point was a post on how to make money from [online] content. An interesting topic because it appears that much of the money is made indirectly through advertising, events, etc. What was more interesting, however, was a post on the the death of the interactive presentation tool Flowgram.
With Flowgram, you could record notes and audio narration on top of webpages and other material. In other words, overlay annotations could be added to webpages. If you don't understand why annotations are useful, you only need to look at references and foot/end-notes. They provide extra detail associated with some piece of content. They let you overcome the restrictions of paper. This has obvious applications for journalism (slideshows, tutorials, blogging, training etc.) The article lists a few alternatives (Diigo looked like a good tool) which made me reflect on my own recent research and writing.
My writing process for the latest blog post (which I'm still writing, it isn't coherent yet) is basically:
- Research and find articles about what I'm thinking about
- Dump them into a plain-text form on my computer
- Insert parts of those articles into a new file
- Write paragraphs around those parts and form new ideas
I dump all of the useful articles into a plain-text format on my computer so that I may refer to them when offline. I'm only using the Emacs text editor for this and it's powerful enough. It seems a good start, and feels as if writing comes more easily this way.
This leads me to wonder, why do Web-based annotation tools feel so limited? Is it because they cannot link to things you have on your own computer or because they can't easily be dumped into new articles, essays, etc.?
