Annotated Screenshots + Hyperlink = A Cerebral Lifestream

I surf the web, my feed reader, twitter and a lot of the other information sources. Often I find I want to use a highlighter or otherwise annotate my reading material just as I would of done back in college (mabye a little less liberally with the highlighting). Jing is great for this and I’m a huge fan of it’s tag template mechanism which allows me to create embed / image tag templates that get returned when I press the link button.

Here’s what gets returned to me by Jing after clicking the “embed / tag” button:

However, what I really want most of the time is an image (img) tag wrapped by an anchor (a) tag. The anchor tag contains the link to the article where the screenshot was taken:

I call this technique disclosure to context (maybe “establishing shot” is more apt–spit it out if you have something better). Annotated screenshots and screencasts are brilliant at providing micro-context (hey, this over here is what I find interesting), but fall flat when providing macro-context (where the hell did this come from and why can’t I see). If you put them together however, you have the ability to “stream” what you find salient within its broader context - a more cerebral form of lifestreaming. There’s all kinds of contexts where this can be used…maybe I’ve stumbled on a new microblogging format (jingstream, screenstream, dstream - desktop stream, vstream - virtual stream).

I’d love to know if anyone knows of a microformat which does this for items that don’t have a web URI (this is my image and this is the application, or context, it came from). Also any pearls on embedding this type of information within the binary file itself with XMP, or otherwise, gets you a beer or my undying gratitude the next time I run into you. ;-)