"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 – our idea was that each web page would be a launchpad for insight and debate about its own contents."

"So 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."

"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."

"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. And so, 20 years later, Rap Genius finally gives us the opportunity to find out. It’s an ambitious mission, and one we are proud to get behind."

"We suspect that if an open standard for annotation is successful long term that our front end will eventually be built into the browser, where it belongs, in addition to being duplicated, enhanced, or possibly reinvented by others leveraging a common API."

"To just say it again for the record: Annotation eventually belongs in the browser."

"Biomedical researchers have been developing early systems to do automated annotation of new papers in the field as well as open data sets where annotation allows semantic processing by reasoning systems built to consume it. This is but one example."

"But that’s just the start. It turns out that Rap Genius has a much bigger idea and a much broader mission than that. Which is: Generalize out to many other categories of text… annotate the world… be the knowledge about the knowledge… create the Internet Talmud."