"“The new functionality lets users add genius.com/ to the beginning of any URL to access a version of the page on Genius. The page is fully annotatable, so users can highlight and annotate any text on the page and view others’ annotations.”"

"The article points out that some of the sites being annotated – it uses the New York Times as an example – may object to their content being pulled in to Genius’ website."

"However, Genius tells Capital that visits to these pages will not cannibalise the source’s traffic or advertising revenues, nor will they be able to annotate any content hidden behind a paywall, as used by a number of prominent news sites."

"Genius has not hidden its ambitions to use its annotation platform for much more than music. “We’re trying to make Rap Genius into Everything Genius,”"

"That round was provided by venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, whose co-founder Marc Andreessen had harboured similar ambitions when he was co-developing the Mosaic web browser that later became Netscape."

"“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."

"In December 2013, it was demoted in Google’s search rankings for search engine optimisation (SEO) tactics that the company admitted were “more or less totally debauched”."