The web application it’s introducing today is dubbed Blerp, and its ambition is to turn the Web into a giant interactive message board by making it possible for visitors to add text comments and multimedia to existing web pages and share them with their friends.

Under the motto ‘layer the web!’, Blerp aims to enable people to enrich web pages with an additional layer of content with the ability to let others join in on the fun at any time. RocketOn is calling the concept Hyperlayers, and if the idea makes you think of social annotation services like Reframe It, Diigo or Fleck, that’s because it’s taking an extremely similar route with Blerp.

The app basically creates a virtual space on top of websites that you visit in the form of a sidebar and a header, which allows you to post text, photos, videos and interactive elements like polls and ratings on top of the page while still being able to see and interact with it. Blerp users get a personal homepage dubbed My Stuff that gives them an overview of what’s being discussed by their friends online, and are able to jump right into the conversation from the interface. In Digg, or rather StumbleUpon fashion, users can ‘hype’ certain discussions to help it get featured on the Blerp homepage, with the extra ability to favorite (aka bookmark) live discussions and share them with friends by e-mail or through a variety of social networking services.

There are two types of discussions: user-owned and community discussions. The former are created and controlled by specific users, while community discussions are created by the startup’s system and are not owned by anyone. There’s a community discussion on every site Blerp users visit, and you can view one I started for TechCrunch here.

I don’t see myself becoming a regular Blerp user any time soon, but the original idea seems to be well implemented. Note that the service is still in alpha mode, so expect to run into a few bugs here and there.

RocketOn is backed by $5.8 million in venture capital (judging from the members on its board by Bertram Capital next to DE Shaw’s Venture Group whose investment in the company we covered earlier) and says it initially developed Blerp as a feature for its parallel virtual world but quickly realized that it could function as a stand-alone tool just as well. Time will tell if it was a sensible decision to make.

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Just a week after ReFrame It launched its service that lets people annotate Web pages, another startup that’s been doing pretty much the same thing since 2006, Fleck, is putting itself up for sale. Fleck is a Dutch company founded by Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten and Patrick de Laive, the famous white-suited entrepreneurs who woke up Mike once at his house to pitch their startup. The duo also run the Next Web conference (disclosure: I was the moderator last year) and blog, which they will now be focusing on.

I asked Boris, why Fleck never really took off and why he wants to unload it. His answer:

Version 1 was too limited and version 2 was too complicated. Latest version is great. Now all it needs is another push and some attention. We can’t give it that because we have other interests now (Blog & Conference and our shares in Twones and Wakoopa) and we are out of funding. Time for a new owner!

The service started out as a way to add the equivalent of sticky notes to Web pages. So that when other Fleck members visit that page, you can see their notes. This idea has been appealing to many entrepreneurs (see, Third Voice, Stickis, Diigo, ShiftSpace, TrailFire) but has so far failed to catch on. Fleck has evolved to include bookmark sharing, tagging, and Friendcasting capabilities. Now Boris and Patrick are hoping to get back the one-million-Euro valuation that investors put on the service during its last round.

Good luck with that, because if they don’t sell it, this thing is going into the deadpool.

Update: Boris wrote a post about the sale.

Here’s a video of Patrick explaining what Fleck can do:

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The idea of annotating the Web has been around for a long time. It goes back to a failed Web 1.0 startup called Third Voice. Today there are a handful of Web startups (Diigo, Fleck, Stickis, ShiftSpace, TrailFire) that let you mark up any Web page by adding virtual sticky notes or comments in a sidebar. One of these, ActiveWeave/Stickis, had to reboot as BlogRovr and eventually sold itself to BuzzLogic.

Now, a new startup that officially launches today, Reframe It, is trying its hand at the same game. The company has raised $700,000 from AD Gilhart & Co., and it boasts an impressive advisory board which includes Esther Dyson, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Howard Rheingold. (Dyson was also an angel investor in ActiveWeave). But it is not clear how Reframe It will distinguish itself from the other Web annotation startups that have so far failed to spark a lot of interest among users.

Reframe It is a browser plug-in for Firefox or Internet Explorer that lets you highlight passages of text on a Web page and add your own comments in a side pane. Comment can be private, public, or visible only to certain groups. Anyone with the Reframe It plug-in can then see those comments in their side pane as they browse the Web. Reframe It also has a Twitter-like social feature that lets you follow other people’s comments, as well as comments within groups. You can follow these comments in an RSS feed, which you can track in your blog reader or other services such as FriendFeed. To help get you started, Reframe It allows you to import your contacts from Gmail, Facebook, and (soon) LinkedIn and other services.

The service itself does a decent job of letting you markup the Web and read other members’ comments in context. The problem, as with all of the similar services that have come before it, is that the chances of coming across a Web page that has Reframe It comments is pretty small. So the side pane (which at least is collapsible) will be pretty useless for most people. The comments also are slow to load. It might appeal to heavy commenters, however.

But even there, disassociating comments from the pages where they appear is not always a good thing. Comments are becoming such an integral part of most Web pages (especially on blogs and media sites) that the best way to ensure the most people will read a comment is to add it directly to the page through each site’s commenting system. ReFrame It comments are only visible to other people who have added Reframe It to their browsers.

That is not to say that there is no value in extracting comments and republishing them as original content. In fact, some comment systems such as Disqus aim to do something similar by treating each commenter as an author and collecting their comments across all sites that use Disqus. Similarly, the ability to comment on links collected in FriendFeed or Facebook help to elevate and highlight the comments themselves. But the reason these discussions are interesting in their own right is because they are occurring among your friends or people you care about. What FriendFeed has shown also is that you don’t need to comment on the Web page itself. All you really need is the link.

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The idea of leaving sticky notes on the Web for others to find has been tried many times, but has never really taken off. Third Voice dotbombed with the idea in the late 1990s, then Activeweave tried it with Stickis (only to abandon the idea in favor for an app called BlogRovr, which was recently acquired by BuzzLogic). The missing element was that there was never a social way to share the Web pages and people’s comments about them instantly.

A startup out of Florida called Slingpage thinks it has figured out a better approach. It lets you “sling” Web pages to your friends with one click, chat about them, and annotate them with sticky notes as well. It is just coming out of stealth mode and TechCrunch has private beta invites for the first 500 readers to sign up here. (Warning: only PC users with Internet Explorer 6 or higher need apply).

Being able to leave a virtual sticky note on a Webpage is kind of pointless unless you can tell people it is there to go and admire. Slinpage joins the most recent band of Web annotation startups, including Diigo and Fleck, that have added sharing and “friendcasting” features to their services. With Slingpage, you can send a Webpage to anyone else in your contact list immediately and even start a chat about it.

Slingpage is an extension for Internet Explorer. (Firefox is coming soon). You can import your contacts from Outllook, Gmail, Facebook, or Yahoo. And, of course, you can also build up your contact list one name at a time. You can only sling Webpages with other people who have also installed the application. The company is working on a Sling-to-email feature to allow the application to spread more virally. And if you Sling a page to a Facebook contact, a message appears in their feed. You can also create a public Slingcast, which is a feed of URLs you collect around a certain topic.

“Every sling becomes a vote, if you will,” says CEO Peter Weinberg, who previously was a technology banker at WIT Soundview (before Schwab acquired it). In that sense, Slingpage is also a little bit like StumbleUpon or del.icio.us. Members save and share URLs, except they do it immediately. When you “sling” a page, a little window pops open in the bottom right of the recipient’s screen. Every page you sling is saved and is a lot easier to find than links you send through e-mail or IM. The startup is based in Estero, Florida and has raised $2.2 million in angel funding. The service will be ad-supported.

I’m still not convinced, though, that it is a better solution than StumbleUpon or del.icio.us for sharing and managing Web pages. The lack of Firefox support means that it is ignoring a group of Web surfers most likely to experiment with new apps. It also needs to develop a widget strategy so that users can distribute their Slingcasts anywhere on the Web, and it needs a better mechanism for Slingcast subscribers to respond with their own notes on a page they want to discuss (something the company is working on).

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The list was clearly put together with students in mind. And while I’m pretty sure that the average student can get to graduation with little more than Wikipedia, Delicious and perhaps an occasional stolen term paper to help them along the way, I’m glad to see someone highlighting tools to help students learn and present their work.

The list is a good start and includes startups like Footnote, Fleck, Bookr, Sketchcast and others.

Tumblr is, inexplicably, named the top learning aid. “It’s a great place for students to easily post a whole lot of their work” Ferlazzo says.

But here’s what I really want to know – If you are a student, what applications are you actually using to complete your courses? And here’s a second question – if you combined all of the time you spend on all of those sites, would it even come close to the attention you give to Facebook?

(and before you say it in the comments – yes, it is obviously a slow news day with the holidays)

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The idea of web page annotation didn’t die with Third Voice, though. New services, each with unique features, have carried on.

Diigo

A must have for researchers
Diigo is a research tool that lets you share bookmarks and annotations on web pages using a browser plugin or bookmarklet. Notes are anchored to highlighted text and bookmarks save a cached copy of the site. Diigo will also let you save to multiple other bookmarking services (all the big ones) and email your annotated pages to friends who don’t have the plugin. We covered Diigo earlier.

Diigo has some advanced search functionality built in as well. With Diigo, you can search for the highlighted words on the web with any of four search engines, social bookmarking systems, on blogs, within the current site, amongst inbound links, and seven different content verticals (TV, stock sites, etc.). Diigo also lets you post links to your blog through posts, or a “linkroll” widget listing your most recent annotations.

Fleck

Bare bones
Fleck is the most basic of the annotation services, letting you simply post public or private text notes on a page. Notes can be posted by using a browser plugin or by ajax when Fleck feeds web pages through its servers and adds the necessary annotation code. Permalinks to annotated pages can be emailed to friends and posted to blogs. We covered their launch previously and expect the company to be rolling out more features.

ShiftSpace

Have your way with any webpage
ShiftSpace is an opensource browser plugin (FF only) being developed by NYU’s Interactive Telecommunication Program and is pretty close to internet graffiti. The plugin allows their users to annotate and remix a website saving it as a communally editable alternate version revealed in your browser by pressing Shift + Space. ShiftSpace allows users to leave notes, highlight text, change images, and edit the page source. It kind of reminds me of the web page analysis plugin Firebug, which allows you to carry out live edits of any web page. For web surfers with the plugin, modified pages are marked with a small ShiftSpace icon (§) in the bottom left side of the screen.

Modified pages are called “shifts”, and if made public, are shared on the ShiftSpace website. Users can subscribe to the shifts of users they like via RSS. The ShiftSpace team also plans to implement “trails”, which are hyperlinked collections of related shifts.

Stickis

Subscribe to only the annotations you want
Stickis is a web page annotation service that lets you subscribe to content “channels” from your friends and the community via a browser plugin. We previously covered their launch. You can also view notes without the plugin when they are served by proxy through Stickis’ website. Channels can consist of text and image sticky notes, RSS feeds (blogs), and even specialized data channels for web services such as OpenTable or Yelp. Every note you make is also stored on your personal Stickis blog, which leaves a trackback to itself if you annotate a blog.

When you subscribe to a channel, it stays with you while surfing the web in a collapsible sidebar, suggesting content based on what page you’re on. Specialized channels, like OpenTable or Yelp, pop up reservation options and restaurant reviews when you visit a page linking to a restaurant. Other content channels populate the tray with notes based on an analysis of a the URL and the note’s tags. When you click on a note, it brings up the notes on the page along with comments on the note made by your friends.

Stickis parent company, Activeweave, also recently announced BlogRovR, a simpler version of Stickis that feeds you blog content from your favorite bloggers as you search surf the web.

Trailfire

Create and share tours of the web
We covered Trailfire’s launch last August. Since then, the social website annotation service has developed considerably, recently announcing some more of the social features it originally promised.

Trailfire is an IE and Firefox plugin that lets you post notes (called marks) right on top of a webpage and string them together with hyperlinks (making “trails”). The plugin consists of a note button for leaving marks and a sidebar for managing your trails. When you arrive at a page you’re interested in marking up, you click the mark button, which pops up a little ajax balloon with a text editor inside that you can position anywhere on the page. In the editor, you can compose a message out of text, images, and hyperlinks. You then title the mark and select which trail (group of notes) it belongs to. Trails can be posted public or private and commented on. When a trail is posted, you follow it by just clicking next.

The new version of the service will now include the ability to make friends and share with them, follow all the trails made by a user, gather your friends into groups, and allow trails to be edited together by multiple users (wiki trails).

Compared with other annotation services, Trailfire has expanded in what I find to be a more effective way. Unlike services like Diigo, and Stickis, Trailfire has really helped its exposure by not requiring a sign-in or download to see annotations unlike Stickis and Diigo (to see notes). Fleck matches this simplicity. For people without the plugin, Trailfire serves the annotated sites through its servers, embedding ajax notes within the page. Trailfire will now also let you add notes to a page through their proxy by a newly released bookmarklet.

Secondly, Trailfire has implemented personal trail pages that consists of a numbered list of each of the links in the trail along with a thumbnail of the website. This has enabled search engines to index their pages and generate a fair amount of organic traffic. One such example was an April fools trail on the site, which received over 168,000 uniques on April 1st, due in large part to search engine traffic.

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The service is clearly in its infancy but could be just what some people are looking for. The basic idea is that one person can place notes on top of a web page and other people can view, change and add to those notes at any time. It’s got standard features like movable notes and bullet points, page histories and the ability to email a unique URL to an annotated page. The URLs are Fleck URLs, not the URL of the page you are annotating. The system is remarkably easy to use and relatively easy on the eyes.

Here’s a sample of Techcrunch.com with some notes I’ve added with Fleck. You should be able to make your own changes, save them and get a unique URL to share. That functionality is reminiscent of Instacalc, the wiki-like calculator I reviewed earlier this month.

This is a relatively crowded space, the two services I’m most familiar with for collaborative annotation are TrailFire and Diigo. Stickis is just around the corner too. Fleck’s primary point of differentiation so far is that anyone can use it without creating an account or installing a browser plug-in. That could make all the difference. Other annotation services generally have a higher barrier to adoption by casual users. The primary barrier to using Fleck is that it only supports Firefox – hopefully that will change soon, because accessibility is what the service really has to offer so far.

I can imagine myself quickly adding questions to pages on a site I’m reviewing and emailing those annotated pages back to a company. They could respond immediately on the page, with no need to download anything or start an account with the annotation service. I like that. I also like that those collaborators would have a list of all the pages we’ve collaborated on created for them automatically. Fleck is even easier annotation than the similar service AmberJack is easy site tour creation.

There’s a long list of features that Fleck aims to roll out in time, including photo integration, arrows, multi-language support and Pro accounts with premium features. If they can make this a more fleshed out service while retaining the incredible simplicity it offers now, Fleck could grow into a particularly solid contender in the web page annotation space.

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Fleck is: patent pending, world changing, paradigm shifting and user experience enhancing technology. Tagging, search, blog and social networking, every WEB2.0 hype is covered.

While the Fleck homepage suggests its a joke by naming every web 2.0 buzzword (above), the blog is more serious. And it’s a terrific domain name to waste on a joke.