Douglas sent me a link to TrailFire, a new tool that adds a neat wrinkle to social bookmarking — annotation.  From his post on the subject:   

I am not usually taken in by these social bookmarking things, but I
have to admit I am finding this incarnation of 2.0 widgetty goodness
quite compelling. All the other social bookmarking tools out there
promote the individual webpage as the most important aspect of a good
find. They don’t celebrate the trail to get there.

Trailfire celebrates the trail.

Invoking this quick to use plug-in for Firefox or IE I can blaze a
trail through the Internet (they call them ‘marks’, but ‘blazes’ is
more accurate in trail building lingo and has an energy that ‘marks’
and ‘marking’ just doesn’t–I’m calling their marketing guys), at each
stop recording my thoughts on a particular page–why I blazed it. Find a
page, blaze it; find the next page, blaze it; then a few more pages
till I have an entire saved and named trail for others to follow. I
send you the URL that tracks the path I just created or link to it in a
post. This new trail guides you through a particular argument I might
be trying to make or just a series of related topics I have strung
together for your pleasure. And if you happen to think that I have a
knack for trails that suit your tastes you can find them here.

My first reaction is that this tool will be a great way for teachers
to organize a guided Internet curriculum for students, but the truth is
that it’s great for anyone who wants to give context to their content
or just to highlight more than one interesting page at a time. Sure,
you could blaze an extended brainfart of unrelated topics and pages,
but why would you? Out here in the real world trails go somewhere or at
the very least by something interesting. I think the natural
inclination of electronic trailblazers will be to do the same thing:
catalogue a series of pages into a contextual setting like an argument
or a tour or a lesson.

    I can imagine creating TrailFire marks for lots of different reasons.  Here’s one Douglas created that shows the simple power of the service.  I really like that the pages this service creates are interactive — I can leave the trail at any point if I find something of interest as I go.  Of course, that leads me to wonder if there are some copyright issues here, as I’m wondering if it’s okay to completely mash-up an entire web page and host it on an different server — but that’s another post. 

    This is definitely a tool worth some exploration.