GReader Help through Trailfire

http://www.flickr.com/photos/nessman/430434707/

So a little more on Trailfire – I mentioned in the first post that you can set it to see ‘marks’ on any page that others have added to their own trails. I have that setting turned on, and got this pleasant surprise while in Google Reader this morning – someone had added a mark to this page with all of the Google Reader hotkeys in it, so now with a simple mouse over I get annotated help on this page. While I am not totally thrilled with where Trailfire places the tiny icons on the page indicating that a mark already exists (they sometimes obscure the content) the potential for adding in-context help to any web page or application, unfacilitated by the page owner themselves, seems quite useful, and certainly makes my learning the Google Reader hotkeys all that easier. – SWL

P.S. – Alan, thanks again for the Muntandina tracks from Magnatune; bringing a huge ray of sunshine to a grey Wet Coast day.

5 thoughts on “GReader Help through Trailfire”

  1. I had the same issue with the trailfire marks, but I discovered you can move them around. Just click on the mark and move the mouse while holding the left key down. When you get it to the right spot let go and it will stay there. This works for all marks … even other people’s marks! Important to note this move is session specific. The next time you come back to the page the marks will be in their origional location.

    I’ve been enjoying Trailfire for the last couple of months. The thing that suprises me is how much traffic the trails get. I created one and over 5000 people viewed it. I’ve seen better trails, one with over 100,000 views. Still trying to figure out how they get the traffic …

  2. Alex, most excellent tip, thanks! That worked a charm.

    100,000 views for a trail! And yet as far as I can tell this is under most people’s radar so far. That’s pretty impressive.

    Many of the ones I’ve seen so far don’t seem to do much more than collect a bunch of URLs in the same way you might collect them in a del.icio.us tag. What I am interested in is the sequencing, and I haven’t found as many good ones of those yet. Examples of those welcomed. Again, thanks for the great tip!

    Cheers, Scott

  3. Hi scott,

    What do you mean by sequencing trails??? Do you mean story like like trails? cuz I have created a few of those and am more than happy to share, let me know what exactly you are looking for.

  4. Tal, what I am looking for is someone who is using them to show the path they’ve taken to learn something with some consideration of placing stuff “earlier” that is more “fundamental” and becomes the basis for stuf further on the path. I’m not meaning this too too literally and I am not looking at Trailfire to replicate some overwrought instructional design tool, but just to see if it can be a very lightweight one.

  5. Hi Scott,

    Sorry ti has taken me such a long time to reply was on vacation and didn’t have time for computer use, don’t you just love that!
    Anyways I still don’t think I am understanding what you are looking for. I know that when I make trails I happen to come across other trails which take me to new places and teach me more about what I was originally searching for. Just the other day I was making a trail about buying a new mac. As I was placing marks some on pages I happened to come across another trail which was similar to mine but much better. I then followed their trail and learned ohh so much more. So for me Trailfire has enabled me to not only link notes together, create a story, helps me with researching but can also give me some more insight into subjects that I don’t know much about. Is that what you were referring to?

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