What is Cotoe?
How do I use Cotoe?
Share your highlights
Have you ever wanted to stock some web content to read them afterwards? Or wished that you could save just parts of a webpage when using an online bookmarking service?
Cotoe's Dashboard can serve as your personal information management tool in such situations. By using the tools provided by Cotoe, you can mark and share highlights of a webpage, not just only its URL(†).
† You need a Firefox 3 with the Cotoe Toolbar add-on to save highlights. Other browsers will be supported in the future.
Layer everyone's highlights on the webpage you are seeing
People see different things even for a single webpage. With Cotoe Toolbar, you can layer everyone's highlights on top of the page you are seeing now. Just like overlapping lines drawn on a paper with a marker pen, the darkness of a highlight is proportionate to the number of people who marked it.
This feature is also helpful when you are reading the web in a foreign language. With the help of native readers, you can skim through the page content while grasping the key points speedily and reliably.
Skim read the trends
You may have noticed the popular page digests on the Cotoe site home.
The web is highly productive in generating information. Cotoe's list of fresh and hot page digests lets you pick up and scan the latest trend of this information-laden web. Those page digests are automatically generated by picking out the most overlapping parts of everyone's highlights.
Integrating Cotoe to your life is easy. You can subscribe to RSS Feeds with your favorite feed reader, or receive daily digests by e-mail.
Ideas behind Cotoe
Cotoe is a tool to read the web actively. Cotoe also is a device to literally share the highlights of texts floating around the web.
The key idea behind Cotoe is that in most cases, you are not the first to read the webpage you have navigated to. What if you could tap into the minds of those who have already read it up? By leveraging the ever-growing database of page highlights submitted by such readers, Cotoe maps the most overlapping portions to automatically generate digests of those webpages you are going to read. That's some smart way to save your time.
Here is the key difference between existing social bookmarking services and Cotoe. Cotoe is a web-skimming tool which covers not only URLs, but keypoints of any webpages.
So it's possible to read the web a little bit more smartly by leveraging the simple acts of others who are reading the web. In turn, your highlights may help others read the web some time later. What Cotoe focuses on is the social value arising from the activity of people who are actively consuming information, which we think has been wasted in the past.
The name "Cotoe" is written in three characters in kanji. Each characters mean "word/language"(co), "ten"(to) and "fold"(e). As a whole, it is intended to mean "many folded words".
To find out if it rains today, you only need to look out the window and see how many people are carrying umbrellas. It may be a simple action, but there is wisdom in them if they are repeated by many. Cotoe hopes to be a place where you can find such wisdom.
Discover interesting viewpoints of others'
If you find a Cotoe user with an interesting view point, don't hesitate to follow him/her.
When you follow someone, you will see their highlights in your Dashboard. So, you are now a subscribed reader of that person's highlights. Guided by the activities of those who you follow, you can cherry-pick the web just by looking at your dashboard.