Nora Brown Design

Web Annotation Apps: A Review

In a recent newsletter, I gave away one free Findability Assessment. When it came time to deliver, I realized that what I wanted to do was take the website (not one that I’d created) and post some notes directly on it, to share with the website’s owner. “Take notes on a website” yielded nothing on a Google search, but “Website annotation” dug up a few different options. Below is a short review of each.

SharedCopy (www.sharedcopy.com)

• No pricing info—everything free
• Keeps a library of your notes
• Keeps cached copy of annotated webpages
• Can share annotated page via special url from website

This utility consists of a bookmarklet you drag to your browser’s bookmark bar. Then when you’re on the page you want to annotate, you click that button and a toolbar pops up.

From the toolbar you can draw circles, squares, or lines, but no arrows. You can highlight and also create a sticky note.

To share annotations, you have to visit your SharedCopy page, where the layout of your library of notes is a little all over the place. Besides sharing via a url, you can embed a note in your blog, which I really can’t see the use of.

Diigo (www.diigo.com)

• No pricing info — everything free
• Keeps a library of your notes
• Keeps cached copy of annotated webpages
• Can share annotated page via special url, from toolbar or website

This app fared slightly better than SharedCopy. For my purposes, however, there is just way too much going on. The toolbar includes a search box (redundant, since I have one in my browser) and a button to “Add a filter”, whose help text says “Add a smart folder for quick access and saving”. This does not contribute to my understanding of how to create a filter, or how it might help me.

On the website itself, there are buttons for “My Network”, “My Groups”, “Community” and “Friends”—what? Can those all be different things? There are also not one but three introductory videos, one of which is around 6 minutes long.

This app might be catering to someone’s needs, but not mine.

WebNotes (www.webnotes.net)

• Pricing : $300/yr, $35/yr, free
• Keeps a library of your notes
• Keeps cached copy of annotated webpages
• Can share annotated page via special url, from toolbar

This app is a little better yet. It is simpler. There are still options to organize and create folders of your comments, which really seems like overkill. More than that, it seems like a burden to have to organize them, and kind of got in the way of my experience. The purpose of some items on the website itself was also unclear—such as the “Report Generator” and “Corkboard”.

However, it is easy to highlight text and add notes, and again you can share your annotated page via a url.

Denote (www.denoteapp.com)

• Pricing : $99/mo, $25/mo, $9/mo, free
• Keeps a library of your notes
• Simple, pretty interface

This app was by far the prettiest. It operates via bookmarklet (no toolbar to install), and has a slightly different model and a more focused target audience. Aimed at web desigers, it is built around “Project”, “Clients”, and “Users”, rather than operating via sharing links. This makes some sense, but I think it could be simpler. Organizing by Project and designating Users for each project would be enough.

Unlike the other apps above, there is no “share with anyone” link, and Denote does not keep a cached copy of your annotated page. Instead, you invite a user to view a project. This would be fine, if it weren’t for the pricing model. The free plan includes 1 Project, 1 Client, and 2 Users, which seems overly restrictive to me, especially given that some of the other options are offering more functionality for free.

Another problem with Denote is that unless you own the site you are annotating, and can add a snippet of javascript to its pages, you can only annotate a single page, rather than the whole site.

If you check out Denote, be sure to watch their slick, cute intro video, which blows the others away (though why it’s not embedded on their site I don’t know).

Conclusion

None of these apps is ideal. I want the beauty and simplicity of Denote with the “annotate anywhere” and “share with anyone” functionality of the others. Oh yeah, and I want it to be cheap.

For now, I would go with Denote for clients’ websites to which you can add the javascript snippet, and WebNotes if you need to annotate any website, and share with anyone.