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Monday, January 17, 2011

Annotate any webpage with your comments, additional information or rebuttals [fisking made easy]

Found this nifty web app that lets you add your own information to any webpage & share it with others.

Visit the BounceApp site & enter the URL of the page that you wish to annotate. Highlight a particular section of a page, say a group of sentences, and then annotate it with additional information, comment or rebuttal. The annotated page can then be accessed with a BounceApp URL you'd be provided with - it is a screenshot image of the page with the annotation overlaid.

Some activities in which this app may come in handy:

  • You come across an article expressing a view contrarian to your own &/or furnishes incorrect information. You can use BounceApp to give a sentence-by-sentence rebuttal by simply highlighting the relevant text & adding your comment to it [also called fisking].
  • You have been asked to review & give feedback to somebody's written work made available online.

Would have liked it more if they could have provided a bookmarklet - you come across a webpage of interest, click on the bookmarklet & get down to annotating it - more convenient it would've been.

Example of an annotated page: http://www.bounceapp.com/27935

Page annotated with text comment using BounceApp

Requires no registration to use, but if you sign up with NotableApp, you can make use of its privacy features & collaborative annotation tools. Can also save the annotated page as a PDF file as registered user.

Save the annotated page as a PDF file with the annotations made with BounceApp with a registered NotableApp account

Not sure if the registered account is free though. It read,

You're signing up for a 30-day free trial account of Notable's Free Plan.

Would be pretty lame if they start charging for the Free Plan, that has a 3 user limit on collaboration, after 30-days.

If you also wish to include free forms & sketches in the annotations, then you could try out Markup.io - has a useful bookmarklet. Can also add text as in BounceApp, but has no feature to highlight the text from the original page you'd be adding the text annotation to, unless you use the free-form tools to do so.

Would be highly desirable if these features are incorporated in BounceApp too.

Godspeed