SharedCopy of Cotoe - What is Cotoe?

What is Cotoe?

Cotoe is a tool to read the web actively. Cotoe also is a device to literally share the highlights of texts floating around the web.

Cotoe in effect is a social discovery engine. You can discover interesting webpages through their clippings and ratings submitted by Cotoe users.

So far it may seem no different from existing social bookmarking services. Now don't go away because Cotoe goes a step further. It mechanically produces digests of webpages.

Let me explain.. Imagine how many people must have read the webpage you're looking at. When they save some clippings of the page to Cotoe, Cotoe generates the page digest by extracting the most overlapping portion of the clippings. By visualizing these key points, we can now skim read the web more efficiently.

So it's possible to read the web a little bit more smartly by leveraging the simple acts of others reading the web. In turn, your clippings may help others read the web some time later. What Cotoe focuses on is the social value resulting from the act of people who actively receive information, which we think has been wasted in the past.

The name "Cotoe" is written in three characters in kanji. Each characters mean "word/language"(co), "ten"(to) and "fold"(e). As a whole, it is intended to mean "many folded words".

To know if it rains today, you only need to look out the window and see how many people are carrying umbrellas. It may be a simple action, but there is wisdom in them if they are repeated by many. Cotoe hopes to be a place where you can find such wisdom.

What can I actually do?

Skim read the trends

You may have noticed the popular page digests on the Cotoe site home.

This list is generated and updated mechanically, and constantly when Cotoe users save a clipping. In just a glance, you can pick up the trend of the web today where tons of information are published daily.

You can make such efficient reading a habit by subscribing with your tool of choice to Cotoe through RSS feeds and daily digest mail.

Share your page clippings

Have you ever wanted to save some web content to read or use them afterwards? Or thought that what if you could save only a part of a webpage?

Cotoe enables you to save and share not only its URL, but clippings of a webpage. With the Cotoe Toolbar, you can clip any part of a webpage you want and throw them into your Dashboard.

You are one step closer to a more efficient information processing and sharing.

† Only Firefox 3 is supported. Other browsers will be supported in the future.

Digest browse

Cotoe Toolbar has one more important feature, which is that you can literally see how others have read the webpage you are looking at.

The toolbar shows how many clippings have been made out of the particular webpage you are looking at, by other Cotoe users.

When you are on a page with more than one clippings, with a click of a button, the clippings made by everyone will pop out overlayed on a dimmed out background.

This is the feature that enables you to read the web while leveraging the actions of who have come before you.

This feature is also helpful when you are reading the web in a foreign language. With the help of native readers, you can skim through the page content while grasping the key points speedily and reliably.