Yeah, I could see this being useful. One drawback is that it takes away the original url - if I send my friend an un-highlighted CNN url, s/he can see it's from CNN.com, whereas you can't with a highlighted article.

Agreed. I avoid clicking on tinyurl.com links for this very reason.

And are long urls a big deal? I found a titanium spork the other day on Amazon, and my friends were fine with the giant honkin' link I IMed. On blogs, forums and the like, you can always hide the giant url behind some hyperlink text.

The only good use of shortened URLs I've seen is in IRC channel topics.

Tiny URLs got a resurgence in a world of SMS and Twitter.

(Full disclosure: I have a simple URL shrinking service myself, http://ri.ms -- not pretty, but functional)

I've been thinking about something like this forever. I think it could easily be the future of forum quoting!

For example, let's say you want to demonstrate that someone is being inconsistent in his argumentation spanning multiple pages in a forum topic. Well, would be great if you could go in "quoting mode" while writing a post, you could first highlight everything you want to quote by browsing the topic normally and highlighting what you want to show and then you can "pop the stack" and come back to writing the post (obviously this preserves everything you previously wrote) and the quotes would be there.

In fact, you could quote sources outside the site... and it could be used outside a forum context. The future of quoting, I'm telling you!

I have to say something about all of this...My name is Joel, I am on the team that built the awesome highlighter. Thanks for all the comments, positive and negative. We're working hard to clean up the product and put out new features. If anyone has questions or suggestions you can find us on twitter:

http://twitter.com/hooande http://twitter.com/lukebrdn

We hope we'll see you guys in Boston

I look forward to all improvements and they should make this a firefox plugin for max adoption and ease of use :)

I'd like to see something like this that overlays multiple people's highlights; the more people highlighting a section, the brighter that section gets.

It might help with arguments where nobody can even agree what the debate is actually about, or what the relevant points are.

Yes, the GPLv3 drafting process had something like this. Implementing this in a firefox plugin that logs into a web highlighting service might be a clean way to go about it.

Cool... http://awurl.com/kydnwg8299

I would argue that this solves a problem which doesn't exist, how about you?

The problem exists, at least for me. I even see it happening here. Someone posts a link to 5000 word blog entry and then posts a comment about whihc bits are interesting. This might be good improvement on signal to noise ratio.

If they can add more features to this, like pinned comment notes on a web page, they can find a demand from web designers as well.

i would also disagree. this problem exists, but most people work around it. i often see legal/compliance feedback on customer facing web pages. they'll either copy/paste the text of concern into an email and make comments (which are now out of context design/layout-wise), snap screenshots and draw on them in paint (arts and crafts fun!)... something like this might make more sense in some cases.

it's a way to virtually stand at someone else's monitor and point at stuff.

1. why just highlight? why not a basic set of drawing tools? (solve the screenshot issue. i'd rater go to a url than get a giant html email.) ...hell, animated overlays, watch me gesture with a mouse... getting into screen capture apps, i know.

2. gotta work better in IE. i could see this being popular in a business/corporate setting, but you are largely dealing with IE there.

neat idea.

Could this sort of thing be done with a bookmarklet? That way the highlighting wouldn't depend on a server.

This is cool. I only have one complaint: The highlight color buttons are way too small.

cool idea, but first thing i tried is nytimes.com and it failed.

The two sites I tried (cnn.com / bluwiki.com) don't work either...

would be useful on a lot of submissions to ynews

try also my :

http://markkit.net

featuring a bookmarklet.