Marginalia
Marginalia is a Mozilla/FireFox extension which allows you to add notes to webpages and view notes left by others. It's a form of collaborative annotation for the web, something which it seems everyone has tried but noone has quite perfected.
The latest pre-release is Marginalia 0.0.3.
Using Marginalia
To add a note to a paragraph, simply right-click on the paragraph and select "Add Marginalia" from the context menu. You'll be prompted for the note to add:
Adding a comment to the Rosetta Stone paragraph on my homepage
Then, to view notes placed on a given page, right-click and select "View Marginalia." This will put little yellow sections in the text, containing the marginalia for each paragraph:
Viewing comments on my homepage
Important Caveats
Marginalia is still pre-release software. Since it's a FireFox extension, there's a chance it might cause problems with your browser if it malfunctions. If this happens to you, you should be able to start your browser in "Safe Mode" and remove Marginalia with no problems. But, I can't make any guarantees, promises, etc. This software is released without warrantee, yadda yadda yadda.
That said, I feel pretty strongly that this software won't cause you any problems. If it does, please contact me via email, at josh at josh is a nerd dot com. Please include "Marginalia problem" in your subject line, what browser version you're using, and what the symptoms are. Also, please include what time you started seeing problems and your time zone, so I can look for any quirks on the server side.
Marginalia presents privacy concerns. Your notes are stored on a central server, allowing everyone to see them. Also, when you make or view notes, it's possible for those running the marginalia server (currently just me) to know what page you've been on. But, you were making public annotations, so this shouldn't be a concern, right?
Installing Marginalia
With all that out of the way: Marginalia 0.0.3 is the latest release. Please click on this link, then click the "Install" button when prompted. Marginalia is known to work with FireFox version 1.0, and seems to work fine in FireFox 1.5.
Future Direction
Marginalia could go in many different directions. The key thing for me is that the idea doesn't die: I developed this code about six months ago, then sat on it. I ran into some technical problems with locating exactly where a user wanted to put a note, and simply couldn't find a clean and elegant solution solution. This evening, I decided to put aside both my pride and taste, and apply a quick fix to get the idea released.
There are a few things which Marginalia needs to really grow:
- The ability to specify more than one marginalia server, coupled with:
- A solid, release-worthy Marginalia server
architecture.
The current setup is, shall we say, less than optimal. Ideally, we should be able to set up a marginalia server in a hosted environment, much like people install blog software. This would allow people to set up their own groups of note communities. - Allowing web authors to specify a site-specific Marginalia
server.
This allows sites to make some guarantees about the longevity and reliability of the notes accumulated, to respond to specific annotations, and to leverage the technique for themselves.
This is originally John Reuning's idea, a coworker at ibiblio. - The ability to place HTML into notes.
The notes are currently text-only, to (hopefully) avoid cross-site scripting and other nasties.
As I said above, though, the important thing for me is that this idea go on. I hope Marginalia proves that it's not only possible to do collaborative annotation with today's technology, but that it's practical. Personally, I'm not terribly interested in being the one to do it, but I also wouldn't argue with a contract or position that involves fleshing this out. In the end, I don't really care who produces it, I just want something that fills the niche Marginalia attempts to.
Thanks
Many thanks to:
- ibiblio, for providing time and resources to sketch out early versions.
- My friends Riana and Nolan, for their patience with my rambling about this, and their feedback and encouragement.
Josh Myer Last modified: Tue Jan 17 22:57:30 EST 2006