Emphasis

Michael Donohoe at the New York Times has developed an ingeniously simple way to mark the key passages in online articles, for the reader's own use and for the use of others. He calls it Emphasis, and it's like Kindle annotations but for Times articles. Donohoe's hope is that it becomes a standard across the web (which is a consummation devoutly to be wished) and consequently has open-sourced the code and posted it to Github. Check out his explanation for it here.

I have for a long time kept an online commonplace book where I post quotations from online writing, but have been occasionally frustrated by the technologies involved. I was on Tumblr for more than three years, but in recent months the site has been down so often that it has been nearly unusable for me. I shifted to Posterous, but I do not at all like the way Posterous handles text copied from webpages (it preserves all the HTML, which means I often end up with some really crappy markup on my own site that I don't want). I may end up going back to Tumblr.

But if I could mark up the web pages themselves and just link to them via Twitter, readers would be able to see highlighted the material I find interesting. No need to copy and paste to a new site. That would be cool.

evicted!

One of my first posts on this blog was about the rather sudden and unexpected shutdown of two web services, Stikkit and Sandy, and the anger that shutdown prompted against the services’ providers. We’re going to be hearing many more such stories, I think, during the recession/depression. Sites that have been funded by VCs while their creators have been trying to come up with a business plan are going to find themselves out of cash, and are going to shut down, and their users — accustomed to free services — are going to be seriously ticked off. And of course larger companies are going to be closing down unprofitable projects, with similar consequences. There’s even a website devoted to tracking such closings: It Died.

It Died took me to a really interesting rant by Jason Scott about the closing of AOL Hometown. (And there’s a follow-up rant here.) Jason’s point is that, just as landlords can't simply evict a renter for no cause and with no warning but have to follow carefully specified procedures, so too virtual landlords shouldn't be given unlimited right of eviction. There needs to be, Jason says, some kind of website eviction law — or, failing that, a volunteer Archive Team that vacuums up the data of doomed websites and hosts it until people can rescue their data. (Jason came up with the volunteer idea after his legal ideas were descended upon by the SLV.*)

I don't know what I think about all this, except that there seems to be more and more to be said for the 37signals philosophy: if the creators of web services charge money for their product, they’re more likely to be able to keep offering it. The people at Jott, an excellent phone-to-web service for reminders and to-do lists, have come to this conclusion: they’re eliminating their free plan. Howls of outrage to commence immediately.

*Slashdot Libertarian Vigilantes