Blazin' a Trail

   

Douglas sent me a link to TrailFire, a new tool that adds a neat wrinkle to social bookmarking -- annotation.  From his post on the subject:   

I am not usually taken in by these social bookmarking things, but I have to admit I am finding this incarnation of 2.0 widgetty goodness quite compelling. All the other social bookmarking tools out there promote the individual webpage as the most important aspect of a good find. They don’t celebrate the trail to get there.

Trailfire celebrates the trail.

Invoking this quick to use plug-in for Firefox or IE I can blaze a trail through the Internet (they call them ‘marks’, but ‘blazes’ is more accurate in trail building lingo and has an energy that ‘marks’ and ‘marking’ just doesn’t–I’m calling their marketing guys), at each stop recording my thoughts on a particular page–why I blazed it. Find a page, blaze it; find the next page, blaze it; then a few more pages till I have an entire saved and named trail for others to follow. I send you the URL that tracks the path I just created or link to it in a post. This new trail guides you through a particular argument I might be trying to make or just a series of related topics I have strung together for your pleasure. And if you happen to think that I have a knack for trails that suit your tastes you can find them here.

My first reaction is that this tool will be a great way for teachers to organize a guided Internet curriculum for students, but the truth is that it’s great for anyone who wants to give context to their content or just to highlight more than one interesting page at a time. Sure, you could blaze an extended brainfart of unrelated topics and pages, but why would you? Out here in the real world trails go somewhere or at the very least by something interesting. I think the natural inclination of electronic trailblazers will be to do the same thing: catalogue a series of pages into a contextual setting like an argument or a tour or a lesson.

 

    I can imagine creating TrailFire marks for lots of different reasons.  Here's one Douglas created that shows the simple power of the service.  I really like that the pages this service creates are interactive -- I can leave the trail at any point if I find something of interest as I go.  Of course, that leads me to wonder if there are some copyright issues here, as I'm wondering if it's okay to completely mash-up an entire web page and host it on an different server -- but that's another post. 

    This is definitely a tool worth some exploration.

Comments

[Douglas]

I can't say for sure and I didn't find anything in the FAQ, but I don't think they are caching these pages the way Furl or Google might.

[josuelegido]

hey you.. here you have a new and good spanish social bookmarking tool.. i dont know if this is useful for you.. but for me it is.

www.miselegidos.com