Save and Share Digital Content with Highlighter

Meg Rayford Aug 25, 2011 Tweet

Now that e-books are outselling print books, your trusty, yellow highlighter marker is getting some competition. The aptly named Highlighter is a tool for organizing and sharing information in digital formats.

Seattle-based Highlighter is a web app that allows readers to share, save and comment on words, sentences, paragraphs and even images. You can highlight anything on the page and, with just a click, you can share it with your friends on Facebook and Twitter. They’ll see what you share and can go right to the site, even jumping to the specific spot you highlighted within the article.

When reading long articles and blog posts, simply commenting at the bottom of the text can limit readers’ ability to communicate. With Highlighter, you can make your comments right at the line of text you are referring to, allowing you to contribute to the conversation in a more relevant way.  

Highlighter brings readers and authors together by enabling insight and more personal conversations. When a reader comments using Highlighter, the author or site owner is notified and can reply. Highlighter gives authors powerful analytics for articles that have been “highlighted” using the app. Authors and publishers can use this data to see how readers are interacting with their content. Highlighter shows them how social their content is, as well as insight into ways to make it better.

I can see Highlighter being extremely useful for students as well. You can save snippets of text from an article or e-book to your Highlighter account and reference it later. I have an unruly computer file of various journal articles to study for my classes. It would be so much easier to collect the relevant information with Highlighter and create my own Cliff’s Notes-style documents for each subject I am studying.

As digital publishing increases and more e-readers are introduced to the market, we can expect to see more apps like Highlighter. Do you have a favorite app for reading and sharing content? Don’t keep it to yourself–leave a comment below!