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…
Originally published on ReadWriteWeb (archived copy)