CJ Eller’s talking annotations. I’ve been talking highlights. Lots of people are talking about introducing friction into how we interact with the web, or at least context. Eller’s posting their annotations; for all intents and purposes, what my Links hashtag consists of is highlights.
I’m beginning to wish the WriteFreely ecosystem had a built-in Highlights feed, a la Medium. I think that perhaps the reason why none of the various third-party highlighting systems ever gained any real traction is because they are separate and apart from anything else you might be doing on the web. They live in their own little highlights silo.
More and more, I really do think that Medium’s approach—your own page containing all of your posts, comments, and highlights–is the right one, except unrestricted to a walled garden; it needs to be web-wide. I know much of this is what the IndieWeb is after, but it should be native. It always should have been native.