culturedbits

Social Markers

Not long ago, I had a conversation with @amyhoy on what the future of forums could look like. She had an idea very much akin to what @craigmod is expressing here:

So consider this: 10,000 of us reading the same Kindle book, each of us highlighting and taking notes. Would the aggregate of this not be illuminating? If I want to publicly share my notes with fellow Kindle or iBooks readers, shouldn’t there be a system in place to do this?

Show me the overlap of 10,000 readers’ highlighted passages in a digital book. This is our ‘Cliff Notes.’ We don’t need Derek Sivers’ brilliant summaries anymore (sorry Derek!) — we’re collectively summarizing for each other as we read and mark our digital copies.

Show me a heat map of passages — ‘hottest’ to ‘coldest’. Which chapters in this Obama biography should I absolutely not miss?

Embracing the digital book — Craig Mod

The essential concept here is highlighting stuff - Putting a special emphasis or attention on a small part of a larger body.

Even if I believe that making data “social” (like digg, fever, facebook, etc.) doesn’t provides high quality insights, I still think it provides popularity and mass consensus insights.

These highlights wouldn’t yet be a quality summary, but they sure would help to shorten the time needed to get up on things - Which is a common problem faced by newbies upon entering a longstanding forum.