Document/Comment Interlacing with Digress.it

Via a tweet from Joss earlier today, I came across this post on How to read David Willetts’ speech to the Royal Institution in which William Cullerne Brown interlaces his own comments (shown in red) at the appropriate points within the speech transcript:

I’ve recently been experimenting with various “single page” commentable documents – such as speeches – in my doodlings area of WriteToReply (most recently posting VInce Cable’s “Higher Education” speech in a commentable form), so when I saw the above approach it got me wondering: could we use WriteToReply to achieve a similar effect?

The digress.it them already provides:

– a paragraph level RSS feed out from a particular web page, where each feed item carries the URL of the original paragraph;

– a feed of comments an individual commenter (commentator?) has made across all the posts on a particular blog, where each feed item contains a guid that refers to the paragraph that was being commented on.

So, whilst I don’t have time at the moment to post a working demo, it should be able to combine these two feeds to provide an inline commented view of a document, such as the one shown above, that represent a version of the (single page) doc with inline annotations from a single commentator.

This approach could also be used to provide an “expert commentary” around a document, e.g. in an educational setting?