
The Awesome Highlighter - be nice, highlight - chaostheory
http://www.awesomehighlighter.com/
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aneesh
Yeah, I could see this being useful. One drawback is that it takes away the
original url - if I send my friend an un-highlighted CNN url, s/he can see
it's from CNN.com, whereas you can't with a highlighted article.

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spydez
Agreed. I avoid clicking on tinyurl.com links for this very reason.

And are long urls a big deal? I found a titanium spork the other day on
Amazon, and my friends were fine with the giant honkin' link I IMed. On blogs,
forums and the like, you can always hide the giant url behind some hyperlink
text.

The only good use of shortened URLs I've seen is in IRC channel topics.

~~~
thorax
Tiny URLs got a resurgence in a world of SMS and Twitter.

(Full disclosure: I have a simple URL shrinking service myself, <http://ri.ms>
\-- not pretty, but functional)

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Hexstream
I've been thinking about something like this forever. I think it could easily
be the future of forum quoting!

For example, let's say you want to demonstrate that someone is being
inconsistent in his argumentation spanning multiple pages in a forum topic.
Well, would be great if you could go in "quoting mode" while writing a post,
you could first highlight everything you want to quote by browsing the topic
normally and highlighting what you want to show and then you can "pop the
stack" and come back to writing the post (obviously this preserves everything
you previously wrote) and the quotes would be there.

In fact, you could quote sources outside the site... and it could be used
outside a forum context. The future of quoting, I'm telling you!

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hooande
I have to say something about all of this...My name is Joel, I am on the team
that built the awesome highlighter. Thanks for all the comments, positive and
negative. We're working hard to clean up the product and put out new features.
If anyone has questions or suggestions you can find us on twitter:

<http://twitter.com/hooande> <http://twitter.com/lukebrdn>

We hope we'll see you guys in Boston

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JeffreyTGilbert
I look forward to all improvements and they should make this a firefox plugin
for max adoption and ease of use :)

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bct
I'd like to see something like this that overlays multiple people's
highlights; the more people highlighting a section, the brighter that section
gets.

It might help with arguments where nobody can even agree what the debate is
actually about, or what the relevant points are.

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lvecsey
Yes, the GPLv3 drafting process had something like this. Implementing this in
a firefox plugin that logs into a web highlighting service might be a clean
way to go about it.

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tlrobinson
Cool... <http://awurl.com/kydnwg8299>

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Glimjaur
I would argue that this solves a problem which doesn't exist, how about you?

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hcho
The problem exists, at least for me. I even see it happening here. Someone
posts a link to 5000 word blog entry and then posts a comment about whihc bits
are interesting. This might be good improvement on signal to noise ratio.

If they can add more features to this, like pinned comment notes on a web
page, they can find a demand from web designers as well.

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yters
Could this sort of thing be done with a bookmarklet? That way the highlighting
wouldn't depend on a server.

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omouse
This is cool. I only have one complaint: The highlight color buttons are way
too small.

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andr
cool idea, but first thing i tried is nytimes.com and it failed.

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Sam_Odio
The two sites I tried (cnn.com / bluwiki.com) don't work either...

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redorb
would be useful on a lot of submissions to ynews

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slim
try also my :

<http://markkit.net>

featuring a bookmarklet.

