Countless user studies and everyday observations have shown that individuals make annotations while reading – highlighting, circling and underlining important parts of the text, moreover adding written comments. Since the Web became the biggest accessible source of information, many of the reading activities happens online in the browser. In this sense, it is expected that the individuals would keep their annotation behaviors, provided that the appropriate tools are available. Although several Web annotation projects currently exist, it is difficult to identify the most prominent in the field. With SpreadCrumbs, we simplify the annotations actions and the social navigation support. SpreadCrumbs users can add in-context annotations to any webpage with minimum cognition load, as they would do when reading a paper; in addition SpreadCrumbs enhances online collaboration and provides mechanisms to support social navigation by means of existing social networks. It allows the users to freely express themselves and to add any desirable substance to the resources. Technically, annotations carry valuable information about the content, more than bookmarks or tags, having a greater impact on collaboration and search for re-finding. SpreadCrumbs exploits all these advantages with an intuitive and easy-to-use user interface.
Venue: WEBIST2009
Authors: Ricardo Kawase and Wolfgang Nejdl
PDF: kawase-webist2009a
Ricardo Kawase 