Clear Night Sky explores themes of digital communications and culture from a variety of sources and points of view and is brought to you by Clear Ink.
Trailfire Channels the Spirit of ThirdVoice
Submitted by Steve Nelson on Wed, 2006-08-23 11:18.
Community | Strategy
In the past I've written about ThirdVoice:
ThirdVoice originally allowed users to post sticky notes on web sites that, for those with ThirdVoice installed, looked like they appeared on the web sites themselves. Web properties cried foul, that their creative work was being modified without permission. I always came down on the side of the user, who knowingly was combining a site’s content with a requested separate source of annotation, and presenting information however they saw fit.
This idea is back with Trailfire, and it has a definite Web 2.0 bent to it. I installed Trailfire and with only a few minutes usage I'm impressed and eager to share it. Here's how they describe it:
Trailfire is a hosted service that enables anyone to comment on any web page. Place a 'trail mark' on a page with your comments or notes. A trail mark can contain text, images, videos and other media types. When you give several marks the same 'trail name' you are forming your own navigation path on the web. We call this a 'Trail'.
I've created my first trail, a mini-tour of Clear Ink sites. I'll add some new trails as my experiment continues.
Steve: Really nice trail. I
Submitted by alex (not verified) on Wed, 2006-08-23 12:01.
Steve:
Really nice trail. I think the association with 3rd voice is limiting. Their ability was confined to a comment on a page and allowed their users to "Tag" and then "over tag" a site. This made a site hard to see for anyone who used 3rd voice and left the users anf publishers fustrated.
Trailfire provides the ability to make posts private and allows users to put them into context as part of a conversation (or trail). This as more of an extension to a blog. Your sample trail is a great example.
A second usage that was not part of 3rdvoice is using Trailfire is to organize information in context. Someone can use trailfire to communicate to others (or save for themselves) a number of sites they have researched on a specific topic.
Here is an example: Treo Trail
This user has done a lot of research on a topic and has done a good job in my opinion. I could save hours on researching this topic by following this trail and leveraging this work. I think this is the big win for everyone using Trailfire once it gains some traction in the market.
I look forward to seeing more trails.
Alex
» reply
I don't really mean to limit