Trailmeme

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Company / Author[edit]

Xerox Corporation

Screenshots[edit]

Click for enlarged image.

What they say[edit]

“Trailmeme is a new kind of Web publishing that you can use to create a trail of content on a specific topic that’s interesting to you. You can also read other peoples’ trails and walk them to keep up with any updates they make.

The technology allows you to gather related content from the Web in one place, in an order or sequence that you think helps make sense of it all. Any number of pages can be collected, organized, and annotated in whatever way you think is best. Trails don’t need to go in a straight line, either. You can make a whole map of content from different sites, connecting web content in multiple and meaningful ways.

When you are done making your trail, you can publish it and people can find it on Trailmeme.com. They can easily read all the pages in the trail in order without ever having to leave the Trailmeme site, or move around between various markers as they wish.”

Observations[edit]

Trailmeme allows its users to make a curated walk through multiple web pages and it presents the walk as a map. Clicking on a node opens the page, while at the top of the window – above that page – links to the previous and next pages wait for you to move on or move back. There can be multiple links to the following pages, allowing you to choose which path to take.

The map is not a mind map or concept map. It is more like a flowchart but without decision diamonds. When you meet a double, triple or higher multiple fork, you decide from the brief titles which to take. But the map does allow you to decide where to dive in – at the beginning or at some mid-point, and helps with your decision by showing more about each node when you hover your cursor over it.

What’s less than optimal is that no matter how large the map, no matter how big your screen, the usable window is confined to fixed dimensions, so trails with many stops become either unreadably small, or visible only in portions. The application allows for zoom, but the overview may not be legible.

Their website[edit]

http://www.trailmeme.com/

Operating System(s)[edit]

Browser based—— Price: Free  |  Status: Historical (defunct)  |  Date added: 2010-12-25

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