Trailfire.com

I stubled upon (stumbleupon ) an interesting, free web tool called Trailfire. It looks pretty interesting. In essence, people create and publish web surfing trails with comments. A user can mark pages to create a condensed surfing session for anyone with similar interests. According to the site...

Trailfire is a hosted service that enables anyone to comment on any web page. Place a 'trail mark' on a page with your comments or notes. A trail mark can contain text, images, videos and other media types. When you give several marks the same 'trail name' you are forming your own navigation path on the web. We call this a 'Trail'.

Trailfire provides a useful "Guided Tour" of it's own page as a trail. A good way to see what it can do. I went for a test run by following a trail entitled "HTML helps" and it was a pretty informative run of sites related to HTML, including some WordPress help, RSS, adding various widgets to web pages, etc. Overall, pretty useful info regarding the stated trail topic. I followed that up with a trail called "Top Hacks everyone should know" which consisted of one lonely web page that I found to be only marginally related to the topic of Top Hacks.

Trailfire currently works with IE and Firefox, has a sidebar and a nice hidable widget for following the trail and reading comments. Additionally, there are subscriptions to other users trails and the ability to add HTML to "marks", which are the indicators that make up a trail and will have comments, etc per the specific page it is marking.

As with many of these new integrated browsing tools, it will get better as it is used. Certainly has intriguing possibilities for research, extension to blog entries, shopping, and sharing.