(2014-06-29) Marginalia Parallel Transport

Kartik Prabhu on Marginalia (side-note). I write margin notes while reading books. They help me keep my thoughts on record and within context. But how do I do that on a website or an ebook?

This is an experiment in implementing a marginalia (or annotation) system using the principles of the indieweb.

Craig Mod wrote a beautiful article about Post-Artifact Books & Publishing talking about the problem of marginalia for ebooks

As Craig notes, Amazon allows you to post and share public notes for the books you’ve bought on the Kindle. Medium allows you to post marginalia using your Twitter account. Such systems miss an important aspect of the process — ownership. Your notes/marginalia exist on some third-party system, not your own site.

Two things are necessary for true innovation and engagement to happen in this space:
A well defined and open protocol. It is to this which all software and tools built to engage the post-artifact space can connect.
The ability to construct canvas independent hooks beyond the reading space.

the protocol is webmention and hooks are microformats.

*This same idea could be adapted to marginalia that lives on the readers’ site; the missing piece of the puzzle is to have a way to refer to a part of the post with a URL.

This is where Kevin Marks fragmentions (text fragment) come in.*

if you sent a webmention to the URL of the post it will be treated as a comment to the whole post. But if you send it to a fragmentioned URL, then it will be treated as marginalia to that part of the post!