The easiest way to annotate a webpage is still printing it out and using a pen.

Annotating online is largely a kludge. But there are a few places trying to do it better. Medium’s inline comments are brilliant in this regard: Highlight a passage and add some marginalia. The comment sticks directly to the highlighted passage and automatically generates a running list of all those comments in your own account. It’s marginalia and a note taking app all in one.

Too bad it’s limited only to things written in Medium.

While some research organizations blog at and/or syndicate to Medium, it’s by no means the main source for serious research content.

But there are other options. I’m especially intrigued by Hypothesis, a set of open source tools that “adds a layer over top of the web,” allowing users to add sentence-level annotations to anything. Hypothesis saves these comments as a separate layer, rather than embedding them directly into a specific website. It’s like the linkbases of old, but for comments rather than just for links.

Vannevar Bush would be giddy.

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