

Ask HN: is web highlighting service topical today? - smlwry

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.<p>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).<p>Social highlighting, meta-wiki over Internet.<p>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.<p>What do you think about vitality of such service?
======
polyfractal
Just 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
1\. 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).

