Rap Genius already is – the definitive online community of rap aficionados; one of the fastest growing web sites in Y Combinator's history; a thriving ecosystem of ideas, artists, and fans.

Unfortunately, our implementation at that time required a server to host all the annotations, and we didn't have the time to properly build that server, which would obviously have had to scale to enormous size. And so we dropped the entire feature.

Generalize out to many other categories of text... annotate the world... be the knowledge about the knowledge... create the Internet Talmud.

Back in 1993, when Eric Bina and I were first building Mosaic, it seemed obvious to us that users would want to annotate all text on the web

we built a feature called "group annotations" right into the browser – and it worked great – all users could comment on any page and discussions quickly ensued.

I often wonder how the Internet would have turned out differently if users had been able to annotate everything – to add new layers of knowledge to all knowledge, on and on, ad infinitum.