Trailfire is a cool, free, struggling service that enables you to tag and describe a collection of webpages.
The basic building block of Trailfire is the trail – a collection of web pages on a subject or concept, hand built and annotated by a trail guide.
Six months ago, when the debate over Personal Learning Environments was hot, I put together a trail that walks through the dozen pages I rely on to share ideas and keep up with the world. I promptly forgot about it.
This evening I rediscovered my trail! More than 1,000 people have visited! Beautiful women have always recognized that I’m hot, but Trailfire doesn’t know what I look like and they named me their seventh Hottest Guide.
Trailfire is a nifty, light-weight tool for leading people on a web tour. Unfortunately, there doesn’t appear to be enough traffic to keep it alive. (Go visit!) The original vision, of leaving breadcrumbs all over the web, hasn’t (and won’t) happen.
RSS Feed
Follow Jay on Twitter
{ 1 trackback }
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Meanwhile, I see that 8,678 people have watched my YouTube video on informal learning.
(http://tinyurl.com/2nch2y)
Hi Jay,
I am still going into trailfire too but not using in a way that I thought I might. When I first came across it, for me it was at the time the only way of ‘annotating’ the web that actually had links between the annotations/comments – and I thought this would deliver a picture of a web ‘onion’ – where you would have:
1) classic web – all the web pages and sites your browser opens up
2) cascading layers of comments around the web pages – so not just viewing the page but viewing people’s ideas / thoughts related to the pages and being able ‘follow’ their thought processes – e.g. if they left a trailmark on a particular page and you saw the description/comments on their trailmark – click on the next one in their trail – and try and understand why that came next in their trail – what was the significance.
3) conversations in the comments on the trailmarks, even if people don’t follow all the trail, what motivated them to make a comment or respond to someone else’s
It also seems to have some use if you’re accessing the web through a mobile device too. I have personally found that if you access using Internet Explorer rather than Firefox – and there are a lot of marks on a page – it takes – ages- to download them all (even on 6MB broadband) which puts you off (reminds me of the .Net magazine article last year which mentioned that consumers decide – in less than 10 seconds (or was it less than a second) whether they are staying on a page.
I do still use Trailfire, there are a number of learning ones on there which are fascinating. I am still reserving judgement as to whether it will be this – or something which integrates audio comments (imagine the bandwidth with that though) all into one, or whether something from Google will just appear as some kind of organisational tool for commenting your way round the web.
I also believe that Trailfire brings other people into your web activities so for me that will always make the web experience more interesting, entertaining and thought provoking.
Nicola, I like Trailfire and thank you for originally bringing it to my attention. Without some boost in activity, I don’t know how they will stay afloat.
I wish they’d pulled off their vision. It would be neat to have page-specific commentary and, as you point out, breadcrumbs to where people came from, their motivation, and where they’re going. Perhaps if Google bought them….
As for IE, I took the pledge when I became a Mac-head. Firefox is the only browser I use. Ever.