ReadWriteWeb

A team of long-time leaders of the Internet community have come together behind Dan Whaley, one of the forefathers of contemporary search engines, to build a system called Hypothes.is: an "open-source Internet platform to crowdsource peer-review on information everywhere."

It's a peer review system to check, verify and critique content all over the Web - and beyond. "Improving the credibility of the information we consume is humanity's grandest challenge," Whaley says. Topic experts will be enlisted in addition to crowdsourcing, a reputation system, browser plug-ins and APIs are on the roadmap and all the data will be stored at the Internet Archive. It sounds incredible, and it's raising money on Kickstarter right now. The goal is for a prototype to be released in the first half of next year.

One of the longstanding laments about our move to digital literature is how difficult and cumbersome this makes marginalia, those notes and annotations we make in the margins of printed text. A story in The New York Times earlier this year went so far as to call the future of marginalia "dim," not only due to our inability to write comments in the margins but because there's not been any good system by which to track and preserve our notes.

TechStars alum Highlighter believe it has cracked this nut, with one line of JavaScript (inserted into site's footer) that lets publishers enable marginalia on their websites and in turn allows visitors to highlight, annotate, save, and share passages and comments.

All you budding Perez Hiltons need wait no longer. Hellotxt's app for the iPhone has been approved. Its latest iteration, Hellotxt 2.0, allows you to doodle on a photo or other graphic, prior to posting it to your social network of choice.

In addition to fun and games, this function allows social networks and their users the capacity for a bit of extra meaning. The history of annotation is a long one, stretching from classical times through the latest dial-twirling on microblogs. With a drawing function, partners in a network can save space by not having to quote the piece of information they're commenting on.

The New York Times' new Doc Viewer 2.0 is, depending on what you value, either a pasted-on ornament of no real use to a typical news consumer, or it's an open-source, crowd-sourcing game changer.

With information-taming technologies like search engines already at a reader's fingertips, there is debatable value in the Doc Viewer's ability to annotate a story with "raw" information. However, the fact that the Doc Viewer's code is due to be released on an open-source basis introduces an additional value to it. It is not just the back-end that a media source, of whatever size, will have access to, but the whole megillah.

Reframe It, a social web annotation tool we first reviewed last Fall, just announced that it has added integration with Twitter and Facebook to its features today. Thanks to this, users can now syndicate their annotations to both Twitter and Facebook, where they can continue their discussions with friends who are not using Reframe It yet.

Reframe It also announced that it has added Lawrence Lessig, John Seely Brown, Terry Winograd, and Clay Shirky to its Advisory Board, which already includes an all-star line-up of Internet luminaries like Esther Dyson, Henry Louis Gates Jr, and Howard Rheingold.