...In other news, I've been listening to PotterCast, which has inspired me to delve back into the Harry Potter universe. I'm spiraling down, so my first pass is to read the Reader's Guides, a fan-annotated (and heavily hyperlinked) guide that sums up chapters in a format like SNPP episode capsules.

If there were some way to do it without causing copyright problems, I'd really love to see fan-annotated books. The best architecture I can think of would be a site that lists footnotes indexed by their appearance in the book, so that I could link the phrase "Gran, I've lost my toad again" (PS6) to speculation on who/what Neville's toad really is, someone else could link just the word "lost" to a list of things Neville has lost or forgotten, and someone else again could link "Gran" to a "Neville's Gran" filk of "Stacy's Mom" (not in that GILF way, if I had my druthers, just a song about her) -- without actually putting the entire books online, except in tiny snippets as indexes to notes. But I can't figure out how to actually make this usable. I can imagine turning on layers of commentary by username, tags, type of commentary, etc., but it turns into a mountain of metadata.

Then again, this has never bothered Talmud scholars.