Genius.com, at it’s core, is based on the idea of annotating. When it existed as RapGenius, it focused entirely on annotating rap lyrics. When it underwent its expansion to Genius.com, texts expanded from just music lyrics to any written work. This means that contributors could upload any written work, within copyright law, and annotate it. Currently, under the banners of Lit Genius, News Genius, and History Genius, this includes poetry, excerpts of novels, speeches, and historical documents..
Now, however, Genius aims to take their expansion one step further. Their next expansion, genius.com/theinternet, will let users annotate anything on the web. This includes online news articles, websites, and basically anything written on the internet. The only current exceptions are things behind paywalls or accounts, and online pdfs. This will let genius annotations serve a variety of functions. Annotations can be used to provide immediately visible fact-checking for speeches and news articles. They can also let experts comment on political documents and speeches. For example, after Benjamin Netanyahu gave his controversial speech to congress, the full text of the speech appeared on MSNBC, annotated by experts in Middle Eastern policy.
While /theinternet has not been officially released, there is a beta testing version available. Visit http://genius.com/beta to sign up for an account, and happy annotating!
As always, the annotated version of this post can be found here, complete with links to each of of the articles and examples mentioned: http://genius.it/elizabethposs.blogspot.com .
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