In Fermat’s Library, No Margin Is Too Narrow
nautil.us
nautil.us
There's an occasional annotation that's about rapgenius level which, if nothing else, lines up with 'the collective mind of the Internet'.
So, as I understand it, it's not like you can ask questions about a random paper you are currently reading, and ask the community for help.
In the early days of the web, I remember a service that allowed you to comment on any page on the web. I think it used frames. It embedded the page you were looking at into a frame and allowed anyone to comment in the margins -- it looked a lot like Fermat's Library. Unfortunately I can't remember what the service or start-up was called.
I thought it was a great idea and very democratizing. You could comment on a newspaper article even if they didn't allow commenting. You could comment on Coca-Cola's page or anywhere on the web. What killed it wasn't spam, advertising, trolling, or inane YouTube-style comments. Certainly those would have been problems to deal with if the service got really popular.
What killed it was copyright. Some company sued them out of existence because they were ostensibly violating copyright by embedding someone else's page.
Close one door, and three plugin frameworks shall open, I guess.
Yeah, but that means three standards, and thus dilution of the usefulness.
Also, the shirts in the store are cool.
Does anyone have an understanding of the copyright issues involved here? Do they have (or have to have) permissions from arxiv and the journals to reproduce these papers?
Great service.