The idea of annotating the Web has been around for a long time. It goes back to a failed Web 1.0 startup called Third Voice. Today there are a handful of Web startups (Diigo, Fleck, Stickis, ShiftSpace, TrailFire) that let you mark up any Web page by adding virtual sticky notes or comments in a sidebar. One of these, ActiveWeave, had to reboot as BlogRover and eventually sold itself to BuzzLogic.

Now, a new startup that officially launches today, Reframe It, is trying its hand at the same game. The company has raised $700,000 from AD Gilhart & Co., and it boasts an impressive advisory board which includes Esther Dyson, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Howard Rheingold. But it is not clear how Reframe It will distinguish itself from the other Web annotation startups that have so far failed to spark a lot of interest among users.

Reframe It is a browser plug-in for Firefox or Internet Explorer that lets you highlight passages of text on a Web page and add your own comments in a side pane. Comment can be private, public, or visible only to certain groups. Anyone with the Reframe It plug-in can then see those comments in their side pane as they browse the Web. Reframe It also has a Twitter-like social feature that lets you follow other people’s comments, as well as comments within groups. You can follow these comments in an RSS feed, which you can track in your blog reader or other services such as FriendFeed. To help get you started, Reframe It allows you to import your contacts from Gmail, Facebook, and (soon) LinkedIn and other services.

If you’re a blogger, you’re probably aware that FeedBurner recently began migrating customers to Google’s infrastructure, and in turn rolling out AdSense for RSS to certain publishers (Allen Stern had a good summary of the changes earlier this week). While initially I was optimistic when I heard Google’s plan back in May, calling it “huge news for content publishers,” today brings an alarming sign of the current state of the contextual advertising product.

In the post we published earlier today, “18 Smaller Olympic Countries to Root For,” the ad accompanying the story in Google Reader was the following:

What we have here is another example of a contextual advertising misfire – Google sees a lot of words about sports and automatically determines that an ad about fitness might be a good fit. But rather than fire up a PG ad for GNC or Gold’s Gym, we get the very PG-13 ad for a gay fitness site that has absolutely no place in the feed of any professional news organization.

Now don’t get me wrong – I’d have the same reaction if the ad was of a scantly clad female as well. It’s simply inappropriate given the nature of our business, and while I realize we can have this ad removed from our rotation (we can use AdSense’s site filtering features), the policy of shoot first and fix later doesn’t do much for readers that have already formed a negative brand perception based on this type of advertising showing up with our feed.

To its credit, AdSense does offer a new “Ad Review Center” that can give the publisher full control over reviewing all ads before they show up – but again, the default is “Run ads immediately,” meaning unless you disable the setting right away, you’re leaving yourself open to inappropriate ads. There has to be a better in between – manual review by us of every ad is infeasible and will hurt our earnings, but at the same time, “run ads immediately” creates situations like the one above when there is no flag for this type of content.

Meanwhile, Yahoo and Google are taking a similar approach directly with consumers in separate announcements issued this week concerning targeted advertising - you can now opt-out of it on both company’s websites, but you’re opted-in by default. This is more understandable – asking each Internet user to opt-in to advertising before showing ads is unrealistic. Similarly, when Facebook serves those obnoxious “26 and Still Single?” ads, they have every right to do so, because if I hate them that much, I can just stop using the service.

While in those cases, it might be infeasible to have Yahoo, Google, Facebook ask permission before serving targeted ads on their own respective websites and third-party ad networks, when you are dealing with publishers, their brand, and ultimately their business, a bit more discretion should be shown in determining what type of ads are displayed. Believe it or not, we actually care.

—Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:Ask.com Launches AdSense CompetitorProximic Puts a Twist on Contextual AdvertisingBlinkx Launching Video AdSenseContextual Advertising Misfires Hit Presidential CampaignsThe Daily Poll: Which Online Video Ad Format Will Win?When Contextual Advertising Goes Horribly WrongAdSense Becomes a Video Distribution Network with Help from Family Guy

Source:Mashable!

Editor’s Note: This post is part of an ongoing series at Mashable - The Startup Review, Sponsored by Sun Microsystems Startup Essentials. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

STARTUP DETAILS:

Company Name: About Airport Parking

20 word description: AboutAirportParking.com helps you find the best place to park at the airport with prices, maps, user reviews and more.

CEO’s Pitch: With air travel an expensive hassle these days, AboutAirportParking.com simplifies the question of where to park your car. AboutAirportParking.com lists over 400 parking lots, covering every major airport in the United States. We provide detailed information on each lot, including prices, available services and user reviews all neatly organized with maps and tips to help you find the best lot for you. In select markets you can also make a reservation to guarantee a spot and lock in online discounts.

Mashable’s Take: There are a lot of Web-based services out there that are taking on the offline parking industry in an effort to make it easier to find parking spots, especially for travelers. The fact remains that it’s a difficult industry to fully break into, given its offline presence and technological obstacles for making it a viable Web-based tool. But today we have another team that’s dedicated itself to bringing the parking industry into a useful online search tool.

About Airport Parking is a site that was borne of an idea some time ago, and is finally manifesting itself fully online. With search capabilities for parking around the world, About Airport Parking has a global reach on a very niche market. But in concentrating on the airport parking market, About Airport Parking has been able to do a few things that move it further ahead than some of the other parking search sites we’ve seen, like online reservations for parking handled directly on About Airport Parking’s site.

This particular niche in the parking industry is more likely than an independent parking lot owner in a downtown area to support things like online reservations, and as airport parking is something that can easily be planned for ahead of time, About Airport Parking doesn’t have to be as reliant on mobile or in-car navigation integration. This also means that the self-service market isn’t a likely consideration for About Airport Parking.

As this site continues to develop its feature set and automated features, I’d be interested in seeing how it could fit in with other travel services. Sites like SideStep have already integrated parking information, or personal assistant and recommendation services, as these too are beginning to move into the airport-specific travel industry.

Sponsored by Sun Startup Essentials

—Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:SideStep Launches Useful Airport VerticalParkingHunter is Just a Google/Craigslist Map Mashup. Yawn.FlashMashMeet @ Austin Airport Concludes SXSWiCNET Launches AtLarge - Social Site for Airport Wi-FiFlagXO Launches Airport Review SiteOrbitz Launches Incentives for Traveler Update ServiceAt Least ParkingSpots.com Has a Good Domain Name

Source:Mashable!

SecondBrain, the online content aggregator that launched a few weeks back, has added support for ten more services, including FriendFeed, Facebook, Diigo, Reddit, Mixx, Tumblr, Qik, Goodreads and Behance. While many consider SecondBrain a FriendFeed clone of sorts, there’s more to SecondBrain’s platform than lifestreaming. It takes your aggregated content and places it in an organized, searchable context.

As you can see just by looking at the list of newly supported sites, SecondBrain supports a wide array of social bookmarking and media-sharing sites, most of which are good for individual marketing purposes once widespread redistribution gets going. A primary focus for SecondBrain is to better organize your lifestreaming content and make it easier to share this aggregated content accordingly. That means that there are things like collections, which are tailored to your preferences and have privacy setting options and more.

One of the best things about this particular format for sharing lifestreaming content is that you can still aggregate certain content into various collections and share each collection with a specific audience, depending on your needs. What this does is increase the amount of content you can share, as you won’t have to worry about any ill-gotten overlap for other catchall lifestreaming services that don’t offer such privacy options with such organization.

From there, SecondBrain is also among those that are making aggregated Web content more searchable and easy to find, hence making it easier for aggregated content to be useful in more ways than just having been shared amongst a group of friends. It’s been quite interesting to see the types of services that do this, from SecondBrain to social search engine Delver, and surely more will come in order to tackle the very specific task of turning aggregated lifestreams into more useful things, from recommendations to marketing fodder.

—Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:Secondbrain Announces Macbook Air WinnersMashable Announces SecondBrain Beta Launch: Win a MacBook AirSecondBrain Official Launch: Q&A with Founder Lars TeigenWindows Live Messenger Malware Forces Upgrade for UsersHow To Lose Your Users and Kill Your Web 2.0 Company: Zoto37Signals Releases Backpack UpdateUpgrade Time: 16 Services So Cheap it’s a Shame Not to Pay

Web bookmarking and research tool Diigo is announcing the launch of Diigo 3.0 today. We initially reviewed Diigo when they launched at DEMO 2007. Diigo is a bookmark tool but what I like about Diigo is their WebSlides feature. It basically makes a live PowerPoint-like annotated presentation using media from across the Web. Back in September I thought the tool was perfect for Web agencies, and I stand by this claim today.

One of the new features of Diigo 3.0 is collaborative research. Team members can bring together links they find across the Web for comments and annotation. There is tagging and sticky notes that the team can participate in to make the presentation stronger.

The other major update is the addition of more social components. If you install the Diigo toolbar, as you browse the Web, you can see what others think of the page including comments, who bookmarked the page and what other similar sites and pages they have bookmarked. It’s all about discovery and Diigo has done a great job in this area.

Here is a video Diigo created to review all of the updates in Diigo 3.0:

Check out the printer we used for our business cards:

Another company launching at DEMO is MyQuire. I sat down with VP of Business Development Michael Dawson for a demo of the MyQuire application in San Francisco. MyQuire was created to let people work the way they want to work. It’s a project management tool that strives to be simpler than the others by allowing you to manage your projects and time on your terms.

Currently MyQuire combines project management and real-time conferencing tools. They are currently working on the next step which is to create a virtual place to work together. The goal is to be the place where you can pull in your relationships, do your work, manage others work and then deliver the final product. Michael noted that their core belief for success is having MyQuire be incredibly easy-to-use and not force people to work in a certain way and lastly that the app feels human. Michael says their biggest competition are those workers who use Word/Email as a project management replacement.

The pricing model is based on premium subscriptions where the first five projects are free and unlimited projects are $9.99 a month. The team is privately-funded and the round will take them through next July.

MyQuire is well designed and the usability is high. I think the idea and concept for MyQuire is good but it seems to be missing some important functions. It doesn’t tie into LinkedIn or the other services, it’s a closed system so feedback left for another person stays inside MyQuire. Since the MyQuire team talk about facebook and MySpace and the others, they need to import/export from them as well.

The other concern I have is that you can’t manage pieces of work individually - what I mean is that you can’t report that a job is 25% done, instead you have to create multiple tasks within a major task and then hope the other workers report as each one is complete. It almost seems as if they made it too simple. I guess it will work for a simple "item-finish" scenario but I can’t understand how it would work for say a web team of five trying to create a client Web site. You would need to micro-manage the project just to know what’s going on.

CEO David Steinberg says, "We’ve been offering a very preliminary version of our product – about half of the functionality we’re debuting at DEMO – for nine months now. Even as a prototype, thousands of people are using it. We’re really excited that we’ll be able to start offering people the product we’ve always wanted to deliver – a tool that will make a difference in their lives". So maybe I am wrong. What’s your thoughts? Give the product a try and please report back.

Sample screenshots:

Source:CenterNetworks

Diigo has had an interesting week: first in the demo area at TC40 and now a full demo at DEMO. I had the chance to meet Maggie Tsai from Diigo and she took me through some of their new features. The initial product was a Web annotation tool which in itself is very cool. Maggie then showed me another piece of their technology called WebSlides. Now this is cool and useful. I could see Web (and other) agencies loving this along with bloggers! Basically its a PowerPoint for the Web. You annotate the Web pages for your presentation, and then WebSlides takes each page live and creates a fully-functional presentation. No more screenshots in a ppt, instead you save each page as a slide and then you can move just as you would in a ppt. Maggie called this an "innovative way to repackage content and the publisher gets all the traffic."

The new "layer" they are presenting at DEMO is a social layer. Diigo will now find neighbors who might be close to the things you are. You can search by tag and find other users who also are interested in that tag. The messaging system between neighbors was twitter-like.

From their official press release, "Diigo offers a variety of productive ways for people with common interests to easily find one another and aggregate into specific groups or communities. "Interest Neighbors" help people identify other users who share similar interests; "Site Communities" unite users who annotate the same website; "Advanced People Search" identifies users based on reading interests and their profile information; and "Friends" creates a connection between people."

"Diigo combines the best of social networking, bookmarking, highlighting, and annotating to let people discover, save, and share the information that is important to them personally or professionally," said Wade Ren, CEO of Diigo. "Not only can people find a collective repository of searchable and relevant information, but they can markup and save information along the way - all while connecting with like-minded people for future collaboration."

The Diigo HQ is located in Reno, Nevada and their development team is in China. Maggie was quick to note that it’s not an offshore relationship, the developers are all Diigo employees. The leadership team are all former investment managers. I like the annotation and social layer tools, but the WebSlides tool is the strongest of the set and could be an invesment opportunity for a company such as Zoho.