News Genius (about page)
From the webpage:
What is News Genius?
http://news.rapgenius.com/General-dwight-d-eisenhower-d-day-message-sent-just-prior-to-invasion-annotated
News Genius helps you make sense of the news by putting stories in context, breaking down subtext and bias, and crowdsourcing knowledge from around the world!
You can find speeches, interviews, articles, recipes, and even sports news, from yesterday and today, all annotated by the community and verified experts. With everything from Eisenhower speeches to reports on marijuana arrest horrors, you can learn about politics, current events, the world stage, and even meatballs!
Who writes the annotations?
Anyone can! Just create an account and start annotating. You can highlight any line to annotate it yourself, suggest changes to existing annotations, and even put up your favorite texts. Getting started is very easy. If you make good contributions, you’ll earn News IQ™, and if you share true knowledge, eventually you’ll be able to edit and annotate anything on the site.
How do I make verified annotations on my own work?
Verified users are experts in the news community. This includes journalists, like Spencer Ackerman, groups like the ACLU and Smart Chicago Collaborative, and even U.S. Geological Survey. Interested in getting you or your group verified? Sign up and request your verified account!
Sam Hunting forwarded this to my attention.
Interesting interface.
Assuming that you created associations between the text and annotator without bothering the author, this would work well for some aspects of a topic map interface.
I did run into the problem that who gets to be the “annotation” depends on who gets there first. If you pick text that has already been annotated, at most you can post a suggestion or vote it up or down.
BTW, this started as a music site so when you search for topics, there are a lot of rap, rock and poetry hits. Not so many news “hits.”
You can imagine my experience when I searched for “markup” and “semantics.”
I probably need to use more common words. 😉
I don’t know the history of the site but other than the not more than one annotation rule, you can certainly get started quickly creating and annotating content.
That is a real plus over many of the interfaces I have seen.
Comments?
PS: The only one annotation rule is all the more annoying when you find that very few Jimi Hendrix songs have any parts that are not annotated. 🙁