Annotating a trail of web pages with Trailfire.
If you regularly need to cite sets of web pages (URLs) and annotate them with references (perhaps to ask questions or offer opinions) then you should check out Trailfire. It allows you to create a single URL that leads the reader to a subsequent set of pages, each annotated with balloon text with your comments.
No need for screenshots, here’s a trail I just created about Web Service API Keys that spans Amazon, Flickr, Google and Facebook API signup pages. Trailfire also host a trail view/summary page for each trail.
I created the above using their Firefox extension in just a minute – quite nifty! A small UI usability suggestion for the Trailfire folks though – don’t automatically add buttons to the main Firefox navigation bar by default! That is sacred screen real estate that people don’t want to have to clean it up after installing an extension. This also applies for the del.icio.us extension folks by the way! A dedicated Trailfire toolbar that I can hide the 99% of the time that I’m not building trails would be far more appropriate.
Microsoft Project is to Basecamp
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Trailfire is to Protonotes (http://www.protonotes.com)
Hmmm, Protonotes requires IE – I guess that rules me (and all the other Safari/Firefox users) out for the moment.
The Protonotes website (or your comment) doesn’t really give me enough info to warrent booting up an old windows machine to check it out – what is a ‘prototype’ anyway?
Wonderful find John, I can think of numerous uses for this where screencasting would have been overkill. Thanks!