I've been happily coding along on this idea of adding marginalia to blog posts. I'm now two weeks in, and figure that's a good time to stop and take account of what I wanted to do, what I am now doing, and what I hope to do.

Just to have a starting point, I plunged into what might be the opposite of marginalia by adding to the margin things that are author-supplied, rather than the usual reader-supplied. Reader-supplied is still in the plan (as soon as I figure out how to do it!). The effect of the author-supplied direction looks to me, so far, like adding a teaser in the margin to links in the blog. That's partly because I wanted to maintain the usual linking structure for the tools that track and follow links. Working on that premise, I s'pose it was inevitable. The value I see there is in offering a bit more explicit reason for the link to be there in the form of a small string of text from the target page emphasized in the margin note that comes up (which, when all works according to plan, is the full paragraph containing that string). It looks like it is giving some context for the link, which I think has value.

I'm starting to think that differentiating margin notes of different function would be important there, especially in order to not force there to be a link. Basically, a cf. that consists of a quick statement of a thought or idea without the assumption of a web page that corresponds with it would add more texture to authoring--again by being explicit about the connections being made. One way to think about that would, essentially, be that I'd be tagging particular words or phrases in my blog, rather than the entire blog. A more expressive approach would be to give an entire phrase (as I usually do in my margins) without trying to distill it to the brevity of a tag. As a writing exercise, I think that would be a great way to bring some of the background thinking to the surface.