Matthew Gates https://notetoservices.com 3m 834
The views of this article are the perspective of the author and may not be reflective of Confessions of the Professions.
Highlight the Internet
Photo Courtesy of Medium.com
Author Note: Since this article was written about 2 years ago, and just published now, some of these websites no longer exist, or have changed, but have been left in to preserve their memory.
There are many different ways of studying, from remembering, to writing on index cards, to making notes in a notebook, but one specific way that most people have learned once they entered college and started buying rented books: They discovered that books came pre-highlighted with the most important information. This broke the barrier and stigma of being able to write in books and thus was born a whole new world of recording information.
Highlighting is taking a few words to a few sentences out of context on a page filled with hundreds of words and a book filled with millions of words, and singling out the most important details, keywords, and concepts within the chapter or assigned reading. This helps when studying for a test and having to remember important information of the chapter. Fortunately, this style of studying or remembering key information was brought to the Internet, as developers realized that many people enjoy this method.
While most websites remain static in the information they present, with the ability only to read them, bookmark them, and later come back to them, there are web applications, plugins, and extensions that have offered the ability highlight text and content on the Internet. Highlighting saves people a lot of time because, although there are people who are still reading entire articles, many people are just skimming them, and if they can get the concept of the article down, they may have only spent a few minutes on the website, but they were able to “grasp the gist of the article.”
Medium.com was a major website to incorporate this style right into the website, with the most highlighted information actually appearing to everyone as highlighted text. Many people who are signed into Medium.com can also highlight text themselves, and even if it is not popular enough to show up on the page, they can still visit the content and it will show up highlighted to them. This tool is extremely handy and saves time when you have an assignment and you have to print out pages and then highlight them afterwards. There is also the ability to add notes with these highlights so you can understand why you highlighted them in the first place.
There have been plenty of other websites that have created the tools necessary for highlighting the content on websites in an effort to “highlight the Internet”. Some are free, while others offer a premium service at an affordable price. This may not be standard practice for everyone, but you might just find that if you highlight the pages you read, and even have to return back to them, you won’t just be “reading the Internet”, but you will be understanding the content you read on the Internet.
Here are a list of highlighting tools:
Medium.com: serves as a blog for millions of people and companies and is well-known for its ease of use and simplistic style of showing off articles, with the ability to highlight text.
Marker.to: Adds an extension to your web browser which allows you to highlight text.
Roohit.com: Allows you to drag its tool on to sentences of text and highlights it for you.
Pith.li: Copy and paste the URL to the article in their website and it will allow you to highlight portions of text. Also contains an area with hundreds of other websites with highlighted text from other users.
iOS: Diigo Browser: For the iPhone, basically like the Chrome browser, but with the ability to annotate content on a web page.
Scrible: A platform for education — specifically for teachers and students — that allows users to store webpages, bookmark websites, store files, annotate content, make comments directly, search the existing library for content users are looking for, and more.
Markkit.net: As simple as dragging the Markkit tool into your browser toolbar and clicking on it and highlighting content on a website.
Genius.com: similar to other tools, with adding the tool to the toolbar, and clicking on it to highlight content.
Annotary.com: allows you to highlight and leave comments about things you highlighted and also gives you the ability to see what others highlighted on the articles they have read.
The following are Google Chrome and FireFox extensions and while I could spend time downloading, reviewing, and letting you know which ones are best, I leave it up to you to determine your favorite tool, because you might favor one over my choice, so it is best for you to continue exploring which plugin or extension for highlighting is your favorite.
Google Chrome: Yellow highlighter pen for web
Google Chrome: Super Simple Highlighter
Firefox: Wired Marker
Firefox: TextMarker!
Firefox: Prostetnic Highlighter
Firefox: Context Highlighter
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