"YayTrail has the power to begin to change the way we all use the web" - a User blog

What follows is a blog by YayTrail user 'BH' (http://www.yaytrail.com/BH)

My relationship with technology is always changing. I was a technophile in the mid 90s when I built my own PCs and worked in the IT sector. But my thoughts and feelings towards technology began to change about 8 years ago when I left the industry to follow my dream of training as a psychotherapist. Technology was no longer the centre of my day and in recent years the arrival of social networking and video sharing websites intrigued me but never enough for me to pay them more than passing interest. They were different and useful but seemed to me to be mostly adaptations of old and existing technology.

So when I first heard about YayTrail I found it more than a little difficult to shake off my weariness of ‘new’ technology. But the more I looked into what YayTrail allowed and might be capable of the more I became excited by what seems to me to be the first true innovation on the world wide web in years. I realised that YayTrail was offering something revolutionary where the internet could for the first time become a fully interactive experience.


Of course social networking, fan forums and so on have for some time allowed some degree of online participation but the problem is that getting involved in that way still has too many constraints. I visited an online TV show forum recently and one single topic had over 20,000 replies posted. Who on earth has the time, energy or desire to wade their way through that many posts most of which aren’t saying anything of particular interest to anyone other than the people who wrote them? I have found similar problems with well known online book and DVD retailers. There are often hundreds of customer reviews from strangers that don’t say anything more revealing than “5/5 Great movie! I loved it” or “1/5 I hated it”. Then there are others who give ‘one out of five stars’ for the strangest of reasons such as not liking the picture on the cover of a novel or DVD.

YayTrail changes all of this and more. YayTrail allows you to perform tasks like posting your opinions of a book you’ve read, movie that you’ve seen or anything thing else that catches your interest. You can do so anywhere, anytime, on any web page and anyone on YayTrail can decide whether or not they want to see your edits and comments so unlike email there is no danger of SPAM. If you don’t like what someone else on YayTrail has to say you can simply choose not to trail them. You are no longer forced to wade your way through pages and pages of largely uninformative reviews of a product you are thinking of purchasing. You can simply choose to see the review posted by a friend, by a select number of people or everyone as you wish and all of this can be done without compromising the integrity of the original webpage.

But that is only the beginning because YayTrail doesn’t just allow you to insert comments but allows you to fully edit any web page. You can then share these edited web pages with your friends, who in turn can make further changes or edits and then share them with yet more people. As a student I could, through YayTrail, have a completely interactive discussion about a poem, book or scientific theory online. I would no longer need to write in an email or message board something like “on page 26, paragraph three..........”. With YayTrail I can simply insert a comment at that exact line on the page and other students or teachers can in turn add their own comments in the same way. A whole discussion can grow but at any stage you can still switch back and forth between the original and edited page at the click of a button.

YayTrail is still in its infancy. At the moment edits and comments can only be made in the form of text but I hear that pictures and video edits will be possible soon. Like social networking it depends on its user base. It requires people to get involved in order for it to work at its best. YayTrail has the power to begin to change the way we all use the web but that will only happen as more and more people get involved. I’ve only touched upon one or two possible uses of YayTrail here so why not take the few seconds it requires to sign up and see what YayTrail can do for you. So get involved, give it a try and see the future of the world wide web unfold before you. I look forward to meeting you there.

Posted by Peter at 9:52 AM