Tag: tools

I ran across a Chrome extension for highlights, annotations, and tagging tonight. It’s called Learning Paths. It works roughly as advertised for creating and saving highlights and annotations online. With a social silo log in process (I didn’t see an email login option), you’ve quickly got an account on the service.

You can then use the extension to highlight, tag, and annotate web pages. One can export their data as a .csv file which is nice. They’ve also got an online dashboard which displays all your data and has the ability to see public data from other users as well.

One of the interesting pieces they support is allowing users to tweet a thread from all their highlights of a piece online. Upon seeing this I thought it might make a useful feature for getting data into one’s personal wiki, website, or digital garden, particularly now that  ThreadReaderApp supports posting unrolled Twitter threads to one’s Micropub enabled website. 

So the workflow goes something like this (with links to examples of my having tried it along the way):

• Use Learning Paths to highlight an article;
• Use the sharing interface to share the highlights as a Twitter thread;
• Make any modifications to the Twitter thread and then post;
  • Example: https://twitter.com/ChrisAldrich/status/1282863853802405888 
• Go to the thread and reply to one of the tweets with “@ThreadReaderApp unroll”;
• Log into your ThreadReaderApp account to see the thread;
  • Example: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1282863853802405888.html
• Go to your “My Authored Threads” tab;
• Click on the “Publish n Tweets to Blog” button for the appropriate thread (and handle any authentication/authorization workflow);
• The thread of highlights should now be on your website;
  • Example: https://boffosocko.com/2020/07/13/55773547/

While this works relatively well, there are a few drawbacks:

• The UI for the annotations is a bit flaky at times and in my experience often disappears before you’ve had a chance to save them.
• The workflow misses out on any of the annotations and tags you might add to each of the highlights (unless you manually add them to the thread, and even then you may run out of space/characters).
• The appearance of the thread on your site is simply what you get.

While the idea works roughly in practice, it isn’t as optimal as the workflow or data fidelity I’ve found in using more robust tooling like that found in Hypothes.is for which I’ve also built a better UI on my website.

Still others, might appreciate the idea, so have at it! I’d love to see others’ ideas about owning their highlights, annotations, and related data in a place they control.