Recent quotes:

Bring your text to life with our “Text annotator” template | The Flourish blog | Flourish | Data Visualization & Storytelling

Ah, the memories of being a student and diligently highlighting key phrases and scribbling notes into the page margin of a handout or textbook. But annotating a text with explanatory notes isn’t just for students: it’s also a great way to explain to an audience the inner meaning of anything from a poem to political speech. Hence our new premium template: “Text annotator”. The template allows you to present text to your audience with interactive annotations that add extra context or explanation. Try clicking on the highlighted phrases in the example below.

Lord Alfred Tennyson

Though much is taken, much abides; and though We are not now that strength which in old days Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are; One equal temper of heroic hearts, Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

You can now share quoted text directly to Facebook | The Verge

Facebook is much more generous on that front — you can post updates of more than 60,000 characters there — but the company still sees plenty of screenshots anyway. Today it's introducing quote sharing, a feature developers can use to enable native sharing of quotes from their apps onto Facebook itself. Facebook is launching quote sharing with Amazon, which built quote sharing into its Kindle e-reader. Now instead of copying and pasting text from Kindle into Facebook, you can simply highlight it and share it to Facebook.

How to Cultivate the Art of Serendipity - The New York Times

A few months ago, I was having a drink in Cambridge, Mass., with a friend, a talented journalist who was piecing together a portrait of a secretive Wall Street wizard. “But I haven’t found the real story yet; I’m still gathering string,” my friend told me, invoking an old newsroom term to describe the first stage of reporting, when you’re looking for something that you can’t yet name. Later that night, as I walked home from the bar, I realized “gathering string” is just another way of talking about super-encountering. After all, “string” is the stuff that accumulates in a journalist’s pocket. It’s the note you jot down in your car after the interview, the knickknack you notice on someone’s shelf, or the anomaly that jumps out at you in Appendix B of an otherwise boring research study.

Ev thinks that Medium's value is... highlighting?

But the more interesting bit of network value we’re starting to see a lot more of is qualitative feedback. Highlights is one of my favorite example of this:

Keeping a fossil record in digital silt

We're going to need better apps to help us share, sort, and make sense of this new flood. Screenshots are more semantically diverse than typical snapshots, and we already struggle to manage our photo backlog. Rita J. King, codirector of the Science House consultancy, has thousands of screenshots from her online ramblings (pictures of bacteria, charts explaining probability). Rummaging through them reminds her of ideas she's forgotten and triggers new ones. “It's like a scrapbook, or a fossil record in digital silt,” King says. A lifetime of scraps, glimpsed through the screen.

Proposal to enable people to vet information at page level

The list of rebuttals to a given page would need to be constructed by real humans. People are still required to identify whether a page is critical of another or not, and will continue to be required until we are able to create artificial intelligence which can understand the intention of a human author.Each list of rebuttals would be tied to a specific piece of content — usually a specific webpage, but as so often happens, the content of this webpage may be cloned, and all such clones would ideally be collapsed into a single entity within the system, so that any time a rebuttal was added to any of the clones, all other clones would reflect that new addition.The system must also remain completely neutral. All rebutted, corrected, debunked etc content is only in the system because ‘someone’, ‘somewhere’ on the web has created a critical response to it. Just because a page has been critiqued does not necessarily mean it is wrong. It just means someone disagrees with it.

Medium reinvents the Pullquote wheel

Up until now you had to highlight the text you wanted, take a screenshot, go find the screenshot, and finally attach it to the tweet. Whew! Hope you still remember what you wanted to tweet in the first place.Now there’s no need for all that rigmarole. Just highlight any sentence on Medium and click the tweet button.

Students use Pullquote to improve online research

“It ended up being a lot faster for them than ‘taking notes,’” said KayCee Butcher, who taught the Honors English sophomore classes. “They were pulling quotes that they thought would be helpful to include in their paper (the direct quote) and also ideas that they wanted to paraphrase/information they needed to include.”

Pullquote = wow.

I saved the best for last, as Pullquote goes into my “wow” folder. […] if you see a quote which hits you over the head, and you think “I MUST show this to my Twitter followers!“, then simply use your mouse and highlight the words you want to quote. This will open up a black horizontal menu where you can choose “tweet”[…] now you have a lovely box with your quote in it which will impress the hell out of your followers.[…]

This.com beats Twitter's clutter and FB's goopy randomness

The hook is that users can only share one link a day. So assuming you follow smart, curious, well-read folks, your This feed will be more streamlined than the chaos of Twitter and more finely-curated than Facebook, which for me has basically become a sad social version of America’s Funniest Home Videos. This is the brainchild of Andrew Golis, who served as an entrepreneur-in-residence at Atlantic Media and later became General Manager of the soon-to-be-defunct (Atlantic) Wire. Golis tells me that while Atlantic Media funded This, he thinks of the parent company as merely an “incubator” for the project.

To read a book is to write in it...

a way to not just passively read but to fully enter a text, to collaborate with it, to mingle with an author on some kind of primary textual plane. […]Texts that really grabbed me got full-blown essays (sideways, upside-down, diagonal) in the margins. […] Today I rarely read anything — book, magazine, newspaper — without a writing instrument in hand. Books have become my journals, my critical notebooks, my creative outlets. […]marginalia is — no exaggeration — possibly the most pleasurable thing I do on a daily basis.

Edgar Allan Poe on annotation

“In getting my books,” Edgar Allan Poe wrote in 1844, “I have always been solicitous of an ample margin; this is not so much through any love of the thing in itself, however agreeable, as for the facility it affords me of penciling in suggested thoughts, agreements, and differences of opinion, or brief critical comments in general.”[…]Such readers feel that they aren’t really giving a book their full attention unless they’re hovering over it with a pencil, poised to underline or annotate at the slightest provocation.

Who will curate the curators?

If a cable package is a bundle of bundles, maybe MediaREDEF is a curator of curators. Let’s call it a “meta-curator.” […]We are in a world of nearly infinite choices for content consumption.[…]we end up watching whatever was put in front of us that was “good enough.” Because how else can we sort through it?
Not only are the pullquotes tagged with a “SHARE THIS QUOTE” — the entire story has three “sharelines” that amount to pre-written tweets. (I assume the disclosure triangles next to the bird allow sharing on Facebook or elsewhere.)
Not only are the pullquotes tagged with a “SHARE THIS QUOTE” — the entire story has three “sharelines” that amount to pre-written tweets. (I assume the disclosure triangles next to the bird allow sharing on Facebook or elsewhere.)
In short, Google Stars supports favoriting (called starring) URLs, lets you add a title and a note, includes folders, and sharing functionality (both public and private). How much of all this will remain in the final release, is not clear. Naturally, Google could axe Google Stars before it ever sees the light of day, but the fact the company is experimenting with such a service is very interesting. Like all major browsers, Chrome let’s you favorite URLs. Yet Google Stars seems to be much more, and not just because the word “items” is used, which suggests users can favorite specific content on pages, like images and videos.
You have a dollar. I have a dollar. We swap. Now you have my dollar and I have yours. We are no better off. You have an idea. I have an idea. We swap. Now we have two ideas.
I’ve been using Pullquote.com to post highlights of my and other old articles to the social web. It’s attractive and like a whole new piece of content! You, reader/writer, are a web content DJ – remix!
We are currently witnessing a re-architecture of the web, away from pages and destinations, towards completely personalised experiences built on an aggregation of many individual pieces of content. Content being broken down into individual components and re-aggregated is the result of the rise of mobile technologies, billions of screens of all shapes and sizes, and unprecedented access to data from all kinds of sources through APIs and SDKs. This is driving the web away from many pages of content linked together, towards individual pieces of content aggregated together into one experience.
Itzkoff — with whom I used to work at Spin — and social media editor Michael Roston chose the sentences, Lavallee said, at least one of which is actually too long for a tweet. That one gets abridged, Lavallee said. You’re not required to tweet the same sentences the Times chose, but a tweet using that link will drop you onto that exact point on the page. “I think that gives us comfort in providing these prompts without making us feel like we’re putting words in people’s mouths,” he said. “I basically looked for two kinds of tweetable content: first, for standalone anecdotes that SNL nerds like me would gravitate to and want to share around,” Itzkoff says via email. “Then, I looked for individual quotes that would just about fit in a 140-character format with a link and, ideally, the speaker’s Twitter handle. (See Marc Maron’s line about possibly being high on pot when he met with Lorne Michaels.) Just a bit of educated guesswork trying to imagine what readers would be drawn to, and what would make the best traveling billboards for the overall story.”
(BTW, if you don’t already know what #Sharknado was, I’m not going to explain. In a few weeks, the underlying event will be forgotten and #Sharknado will become the word we all use to refer to a vaporous swirl of meaningless, mass-produced meme-riffing that itself becomes so vast it collapses in on itself into a diamond-hard object of actual meaning, the perfect linguistic symbol for a socially manufactured 5k-tweet-a-minute perfect-storm of meaninglessness.)