Question

Posted on 9/20/2007 to Web4Lib by Sandra Cahillane

A faculty member is "looking for software that will allow multiple people to tag or index the content of a single document or website — i.e., to tag sentences and paragraphs within a multi-paragraph document." He believes that this software already exists. Does anyone know any details about it?

Answers

If working with a publicly accessible Web page, try SharedCopy See my notes on this product.

David Rothman

If you use the "Tag this" toolbar button on del.icio.us, highlighted text on a webpage will be automatically pasted into the notes section of the bookmark form when you tag it. I suspect other social bookmarking services provide a comparable feature. Your faculty member might also be interested in a very useful tool called Citebite (formerly Deep-Quote), which creates a url for a selected string of text. If you install the Firefox extension, all you need to do is select text on a page, right click and choose "citebite," and a url is corrected for the selected passage. Very useful for referring others directly to a specific passage in a document, without requiring them to wade through pages of text. Once the url is created, you can social bookmark it and do whatever else you can normally do with urls.

Petter Næss

CommentPress allows paragraph-level (not sentence-level) comments on top of an otherwise normal WordPress blog. The Institute first used this software to allow user comments on the text of Mitchell Stephens' e-book, "The Holy of Holies: On the Constituents of Emptiness. Here's the blurb about the software:

"CommentPress is an open source theme for the WordPress blogging engine that allows readers to comment paragraph by paragraph in the margins of a text. Annotate, gloss, workshop, debate — with CommentPress you can do all of these things on a finer-grained level, turning a document into a conversation. It can be applied to a fixed document (paper/essay/book etc.) or to a running blog.

Sarah Washburn

You need very different applications if it's for documents vs. websites, especially if you want to be able to tag live websites. For live websites, you'd be better off (I think) using a wiki, which can allow for many people to edit and tag info on multiple revisions of a page. For documents, try Google docs (Google docs ) or Zoho. Zoho also does wikis and project management.

Andy Havens