Intro

rEmark! is represented by floating buttons that readers can use to give feedback to authors. Clicking on the plus button records a positive response to specific text that readers highlight; the minus button indicates some form of dissatisfaction with a highlighted segment.

Readers can leave comments for each fragment they click on. Other visitors to the site can choose to see all comments ("comments ON") or not ("comments OFF"—default).

Value

For authors, bloggers, and podcasters rEmark! is primarily a source of specific, actionable feedback about their content. They get the highlighted passages, the number of positive and negative clicks, and comments associated with each.

Feedback and Monetization

Clicks on the plus button are equivalent to plus-one-RAD and clicks on the minus button are equivalent to minus-one-RAD. Authors will get the actual numbers for feedback. For monetization, any money available for distribution will get allocated according to the number of RADs assigned to each segment (i.e., but no less than zero).

Any money that flows through the RADs comes from funds that readers set up to support the blog sites they follow. Alternatively, a fund may be set up to support a pool of specific blog sites, or to support a particular topic.

Any personal information provided by the user will be used to create the fund and then discarded, but before throwing it out we’ll calculate an ID hash off it. We can later use this ID to associate the reader with the fund while users remain anonymous.

For example, let’s assume that,

• Anita has set up a $10 fund to be distributed every week.
• Week 1, she gave RADs to three blog posts.
• Week 2, she gave RADs to five,

It doesn’t matter if all the posts were written by one author or several: Post 1.3 gets $1.67 one week and Post 2.3 gets $1.00 the following week.

Explicit Alignment

Another Thought

rEmark! and RADs! will share a backend.

Credits

rEmark is inspired by a similar idea from Cynthia Typaldos.