The current way to share something in memex is to simply share the whole bulk of (non-protected) annotations in a page or collection. This is okay if you mean to either
- share your annotations, or
- keep them protected for you.
The problem is, you might want to share the same web content with various groups of people, targeting certain annotations and highlights at group A, and other annotations and highlights at group B, etc… The current behaviour is not fine-grained enough.
This is what hypothes.is does with its “group” feature, where you “post” your annotations in one or another group. It can be invaluable for people needing to serve the same document in various contexts, but tailoring their seasoning of this document to suit each context. Teachers are a good example.
Solution 1: layers
A memex version of this tailoring could be “layers”. Layers would be “collections” for annotations, highlights and comments. Remember that currently, collections collect entire pages, not individual annotations. By contrast, you would then be able to associate an annotation with a specific layer, say LayerA, and another annotation with LayerB, and another annotation with LayerA and LayerB, i.e. common… You would then only have to share the desired layer, so that your groupB only gets those annotations associated with LayerB etc.
An annotation could be associated with no layer at all and hence be “protected”.
Solution 2: tags
It might be my personal problem, I’ve never understood the use of tags when we already had collections… Anyway, since tags are already in place for individual annotations, the ability to share tags might be all it takes to have an implementation of this feature… You would only have to tag GroupA here, GroupB there and there, and sharing “tag GroupB” would not display those GroupA tags.