EDIT: 7/10/11 – this [article]1 in ijCSCL from the abstract seems to discuss the use of collaborative annotation/commenting. However, although it’s a really useful discussion of the educational considerations, as far as I can see none of the tools does quite what I’m suggesting below, without the need for client based install or fairly heavy server side stuff (i.e. not just a wordpress plugin or ‘activation’ option on a page or something similar). I saw this: and got excited about the idea of collaborative commenting. But looking at tools, they mostly seem to be either based on downloading software/addons (e.g. google sidewiki), used by private groups (in which case, google docs will sort of do the job), or individual use of general webpages which can then be shared (e.g. diigo.com). What I’m looking for is a way to sort of ‘wikify’ documents, but without actually opening it up to editing. I want to ‘social media’ up my documents to allow commenting (and voting, and replies) on sections of the document, as well as the document overall. So if someone had an extra link to share on one particular part, they could do so. If they thought I’d misinterpreted something, they could say so – on that element. If they loved a video I’d embedded, they could comment on that rather than the whole post, and so on. I imagine it looking like the attached (I’m no artist):
In order to upload this, I created a doc in word (easy enough)…then got stuck, ‘publish to blog’ didn’t work, save in html and paste code (issue of images), upload to google docs in various formats (loses ALL useful formatting), upload to google docs in pdf and embed (won’t embed pdfs), convert docx to png (lose right side), convert pdf to png, upload png, embed png…size just too small, screen shot docx stitch 2 together, save png, upload png……I know I’ll have been stupid somewhere, but, intuitive solutions please? UPDATED 3/10/11 – moved to wordpress in order to maintain an iframe…because google sites ‘blog’ functionality is lacking.