[annotator-dev] integrating the Annotator with Wordpress

[Andrea Fiore]

Hi everyone,
My name is Andrea, and I am a freelance web developer currently based in 
Brighton. I write to you to briefly introduce myself, and to announce 
that I have just started working on an Annotator plugin for Wordpress.

I am very excited to have the opportunity of contributing to an 
ambitious and  well executed software project like the Annotator.
Web annotation is by no mean a new concept. On the contrary, I would 
argue that is an idea that has been around since the very early days of 
digital media.  I am thinking of  vapourware like Vannevar Bush's Memex, 
and Ted Nelson's Xanadu, but also at previous web based implementations 
such as W3C Annotea, or more recent projects like Shiftspace.org, and 
Emphasis (https://github.com/NYTimes/Emphasis).

And yet none of these projects has really managed to  reach a critical 
mass of users, and inline annotation is still far from occupying a 
prominent role in the way people use the web.
I am not sure if the OKFN Annotator  should aim at becoming  "the 
annotation" platform in the same way as google has become "the search" 
platform. However I can say that, as a user, it has been probably my 
best Web annotation experience so far :)

Despite being built on a rather poor technological stack, Wordpress is 
probably one of the most popular web publishing tool. I believe it could 
provide a very exciting space for people to use  the annotator, and it 
may offer interesting opportunities for for exploring new uses for it.

So, in the next few days I will work  on a first, very basic pre-alpha 
version of the Wordpress addon. The project source code lives here 
(https://github.com/okfn/annotator-wordpress). I will soon set up also a 
  wordpress installation so you can play with the addon, break it, and 
possibly report a few bugs and feature requests :)

Will keep you guys posted on the project progress,
Obviously your feedback is much welcome!

Cheers and have a good week end,
Andrea