Disclaimer: I am testing out Trailfire as part of a consulting agreement.
Full details below.
At the
beginning of September I posted
about Trailfire, a unique social bookmarking
service that reminded me at the time of Vannevar Bush‘s 1945 pre-hypertext
concept The Memex. Essentially what Trailfire does is enable you to place annotations on
any web page and link related web pages to form a trail, or navigation path.
About a month after my initial post, the Trailfire team contacted me with a consulting
proposal to try out a custom trail mark on my blog – one designed specifically for
Read/WriteWeb. The idea was that this would enable me to provide branded
navigation trails on my blog. I thought this sounded like a nice ‘value add’ feature,
that readers might find interesting. Also trails / hypertextual navigation is a concept
that I am very interested in experimenting with – so I agreed. But to be perfectly clear
and transparent, I am being paid my regular consulting fee to try out Trailfire and
report back to them.
As part of the experiment I will be using Trailfire on this blog, to provide related
information via trails. Basically this is a totally optional feature for you, the reader.
If you don’t download the Trailfire product, then you will notice absolutely no
difference to Read/WriteWeb. Of course if you do download Trailfire to follow my
“trails”, then I hope you will discover more relevant content – and what’s more,
contribute your own trails if you feel so inclined. Look for the little red pin (see
screenshot below) – every time you see it roll your mouse over it to view the note.
So here’s how this will work: over the next month I will be adding “trails” to around
4-6 blog posts per week. These trails will provide extra or related information about the
post – including not just text, but possibly pictures, video and audio files. You will
only see these trails if you download Trailfire. I’ve started
by adding a trail to my Weekly Wrapup
post from earlier today – I did a chronological trail of my Web Office coverage
across R/WW and (mostly) ZDNet.
If you don’t have Trailfire downloaded, you can also view the trail at this address:
http://trailfire.com/readwriteweb/marks/20121
So, I’m not sure how this will pan out. But it certainly seems to me like an interesting
experiment, with appropriate ‘old school’ pre-Web influences (Vannevar Bush, Douglas
Engelbart, Ted Nelson). Let me know your thoughts…
