I recently spoke with Aza Raskin at FOWA on Ubi­quity commands/​annotations shar­ing. I prom­ised I’ll pro­to­type some­thing, here it is…

(If the video is clipped, try it here)

When someone applies an Ubi­quity com­mand to a piece of con­tent that tells us what’s the type of that con­tent. The user is mak­ing an annota­tion which is not made for the annota­tion sake, but made for solv­ing a real need. That annota­tion if shared could be use­ful in vari­ous ways.

But first let’s look at all the data involved, con­sider that Alice is select­ing some text on a web page, invokes Ubi­quity and types ‘trans­late to japan­ese’. We have the folow­ing elements:

1. user: anonym­ous or with an iden­tity (URI)
2. web page address (URI)
3. selec­ted content
4. Ubi­quity com­mand (URI) with arguments

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