Jump Knowledge example

Here’s an easy to use little app for both staff and students. It’s called Jump Knowledge (jkn for short) and it allows you to grab a copy of any webpage you’re reading and write whatever you want all over it (called annotating).

That’s not the cool part - once you’ve left your mark you can share the page with anyone else in a variety of ways: via email, your own blog, print it out, or bookmark it to come back to later. You can come back even after the original has changed because Jump Knowledge keeps a copy of it on its own servers, meaning you’ll never lose the extra info you’ve added.

You don’t need an account, but if you do create one, jkn keeps a list of every page you’ve written over so you can keep track from one handy location.

You can check out the simple page I’ve annotated and shared at http://jkn.com/View?j=805037.873488227171 (ugly URL, but nevermind). Jump Knowledge is the simplest tool of this sort that I’ve found so far as it doesn’t require you to sign up or install extra software, and it makes the page available to anyone anywhere on the web (although you can set your pages to private).

Next time you want to share something you’ve read, instead of just emailing or posting a plain link consider using Jump Knowledge to write your own thoughts or highlight the important parts.

Update: 2008-10-02 Jump Knowledge has closed down:

Information on the closure of Jump Knowledge Since we can no longer guarantee the long-term availability of your data, we have made the difficult decision to shut JKN down gracefully.

Jump Knowledge (via Lifehacker.com)