German audience might remember a service called webride from the last wave of internet buzz. It was then run by datango and took people on a guided tour thru the web. The service went the way of all things in the end.
The name webride is now back for good. Now its run by a small team of smart guys, which developed it in a amazing short time. And now it’s the people how take the ride over and annotate the web by a sophisticated system of comments tags and discussions.
All it is though is a bookmarklet (soon a toolbar also, i hope) that takes you to a view of your current document with a frame on the left side where you can leave your annotation and join the discussion about the content of the document you see on the right.
Did i just say all? What’s more is, that you can keep easily track of your comments on your profile page and also find out what others are into on their collection of discussions. Needless to mention that a worldview of most popular and recent discussions is the global recommendation part of the thing. Even more needless to say is that you can tag the pages you discuss about. More interesting is, that you can easily include the discussion on your own site as well (look at their blog). And a plugin for wordpress and MT seems to be coming, too, which means that a commentator on your blog will bring all his recent comments and all his social cloud with him.
You might sigh about it being the eleventh social bookmarking and site recommendation service out there. Well, true. There is StumbleUpon, Ma.gnolia, shadows and the godmother of them all: del.icio.us. But none of them either work with such an elaborated ajaxed interface while being so unintrusively designed. And none of them others have their focus so clearly on the discussion part of the annotated web.
And none of them had their logo designed by me. Oh wait, SU does :)
Join the webride!
2006-05-30 14:28
The thing that makes Webride different is that it is not a website where users generate meta-content about other websites (like del.icio.us), but a service attaching user content directly to the web pages it refers to. To me, this is much less dispensable as it may seem at first sight:
– Webride facilitates public discussions on any page based information entity on the web – immediately visible alongside the content itself. This has been limited to blog comment functions until now.
– Webride enables you to keep your comments or discusson posts on web pages in one place. User contributions of this type are usually spread around the web (have you ever tried to keep track of all the stuff you have posted on blogs and forums in the last 12 months?).
– You can use a webride thread as an easy-to-build-in comment tool if you want people to comment your website’s content . What’s even more interesting is that this might also happen WITHOUT you wanting it: Discussions about your brand, product, company, etc could be taking place in a frame right beside your page, like it or not. this could cause some pain to PR and Marketing divisions already lamenting about all those negative blog posts popping up on Google.
2006-05-30 14:40
thx for that angle, rupert. you def should start a blog :) your english is more fluent than mine anyway.