I have been test driving a new Web 2.0 firefox add in called Trailfire. Its a rather unique tool that might just give the phenomena of Digg and Slashdot a run for their money.

It has been described that Digg offers no editorial control yet comes up with good stories, but the comments of posters are rarely quality material.

Similarly, Slashdot offers up very strict editorial control, receives excellent comments but the stories get much less attention as the focus is on the comments.

Trailfire seems to come in at a tangent to these older technologies (Digg is sometimes described as a 2.0 technology itself) and offer a simple interface and simple output that prevents some of the problems of both.

How it Works
A user can surf the web at leisrure and while looking at a website or article of interest can hit a Trailfire comment button from which a little box pops up (looks like a post it note) and the user can comment on the article, providing a ‘Trail’ Title to group the comment on the article to a collection of comments on a similar topic.
You can see one of my trails here: (when you click on the link it will take you to the actual article and website I looked at and a pop up post it like note will pop up to the right with my comment inside.)
Airline Reactions to recent Terror
Once there the stick it note also offers small navigation buttons that allow you to toggle through the ‘trail’ of articles that I commented on within this heading.

Now why do I think this can best Digg or Slashdot?  Well for one thing, it keeps the comment close to the original content.  Both Digg and Slashdot requires users to submit articles, which may or may not be something close to a primary source.  They both have processes to slow down abuse, but its very possible to have a submission of a blog article based on a blog article based on a blog article based on a news story.  Hence, the result that many people don’t always make it to the actual article and get hung up on the comments.

Another great thing about this is that viewers can follow the trail of a commentator that they choose to follow without childish comments, flames, curse words and off beat arguments breaking out amongst a community of people that don’t have much to do all day long.

There are some useful subsciption options with this as well.  I think this is the area that Trailfire has the greatest room for improvement.  I’d very much like to be able to feed the headlines and the comments I’ve posted to my website in summary form, kind of like the tool that feedburner offers for news and blog feeds.  Currently Trailfire is halfway there offering an embedded link that will walk you down the trail, but I’d prefer to see a map or outline of where I’m going first.

Never the less, the tool has made a great and very useful start and I’m going to have some fun working and following this new technology!

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Time and again, NASA pops up as an example of an agency that has lost or mis-managed knowledge. There is an urban legend that NASA lost the notes and information used to create the final designs of many of the rockets of the Apollo program. Many of the original draft notes were on paper, which has not been preserved well, and worse many of the early drafts went through multiple hands-on real time revisions that were never documented at all. Many of the engineers from the period have retired or passed away and the knowledge they developed from the apollo program is now lost to the ages.

Last week, it was reported that a mock up of Skylab that had been held at a space museum in Alabama was recovered from a parking lot where it had been stored under shrink wrap for several years. The shrink wrap had been donated by the Army, but over the years fell apart until birds and teenagers had their way with the replica of SkyLab. Now volunteers are working to restore this vestige of the Apollo program built from spare parts.

Massive Library Fine?
So now it comes as little surprise that the National Archives who held the original tapes of the lunar landing has no record of receiving the tapes back from NASA after NASA checked them out back in the 1970’s.

The tapes were special in that they were filmed at 10 frames per second so that the video could be transmitted from space to a specially built TV that could play that format. This TV was then filmed by live television and transmitted around the world. NASA was preparing to scrap the now antique machinery capable of replaying the tapes, and when they went looking for the Apollo 11 tapes, there were no tapes to be found???

Conspiracy heyday
The loss of knowledge in the tapes has fueled the fire of conspiracy theorists that claim that the lunar landing was a staged hoax. The tapes were magnetic and can decay if not stored correctly so tracking them down is a time sensitive issue.

For more on this story see One Giant Mystery for Mankind

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