Tom Critchlow and I have written a web-native quoting tool called Quotebacks, which is now available for download. Quotebacks allow you grab any piece of text from the web, and quote-tweet it in your blog without losing context, like this:

Interestingness is not a fixed property, but a move in a conversation between what everyone in the audience already knows (the “assumption ground“) and the surprise reveal. Being interesting means that the audience shares, or can be made to share, the common knowledge that the author seeks to undermine. Interestingness is a function of whatever body of knowledge is already assumed to be true. Therefore, it can be difficult to see the interestingness – the point – of a fragment of an alien conversation.

Thus, “Quotebacks” is three things:

1. A web-native citation standard and matching UX pattern
2. A tiny library, quoteback.js, that converts HTML <blockquote> tags into elegant interactive webcomponents
3. A browser extension to create quoteback embeds and store any quotes you save to publish later

If you’re interested, you can download the extension and try it out yourself, and learn about the project details at quotebacks.net.

Thank you to our early testers Sonya, CJ, and the Blogger Peer Review.