NowComment: Free web app for digitally annotating online documents in a “social context,” that is, allowing other students to read and add to each other’s annotations. Inline annotations on NowComment appear on a 2-pane interface, alongside the respectively annotated parts of the text, enabling contextualized reading and analysis.

NowComment annotates html and Microsoft Word documents, but PDF upload is not yet very reliable.

With NowComment you can create class groups and subgroups, sort comments through a variety of ways, and annotate using text, image, audio, and video. Students are also able to create and share their own documents without instructor’s interference.