Web 2.0 has generated huge amounts of information after enlisting all of us in content creation. However, while the barriers to content creation have fallen this has only raised the challenges to finding, storing and sharing the good stuff within modern version of Borges’ Library of Babel, Babel, Babel. What do you do when you find a good passage within a longer document? Do you send a link to the entire document and let your friend figure out what you like? Do you cut out the passage and lose the context? Do you create a blog post with the quote and a link to the rest. The first two are suboptimal and the last requires time you may not have.

Roohit is designed to address this issue with its Instant Highlighter that enables users to highlight as they surf the web. It also allows users to automatically clip, collect, bookmark, and share online content via e-mail, Instant Messenger, auto-blog or shiny URL: all of this with just One Click. I recently spoke with Rohit Chandra, CEO at RoohIt, He has been involved with the web for some time. Rohit mentioned that he is the patented inventor of the personalized url (e.g., http://joesmith.blog.com instead of http://blog.com/joesmith).

Since RoohIt is a social medium, when users make a highlight, they implicitly cast a vote, thereby providing an in-built method of digging/social bookmarking where they can discover what other like-minded individuals are highlighting. The service is available to anyone at any time wanting to share, collect and archive a small snippet of information of individual relevance for free, with no software download and no sign up required.

RoohIt is designed for simplicity of use. Instead of downloading software, you type roohit.com before the url you are viewing. This transforms your cursor into a highlighter. You can see an example below where I RoohIt enabled my own blog simply by changing the url. Notice the new url and the palette where I can select highlighting colors and decide where to send what I highlighted through email or IM.

You can add a RoohIt button to your browser to automatically start RoohIt. There is also a widget so you can share what you are highlighting in a scrolling box on your blog. You can also share the highlighted page directly to Facebook, delicious, digg or any social bookmarking community. All highlights are saved to a central repository enabling collation of personal snippets and discovery of what other like-minded individuals are highlighting; resulting in a micro-bookmarking archival system. RoohIt is available for free to all of us. The business plan is to sell the feature to major web publishers as an additional feature like print and email to a friend. This makes sense to me.

I like the simplicity of the solution and the fact it takes a familiar activity from the physical world into the virtual world. At the same time, it brings along the advantages of the virtual world. Rohit said they refer to the process as micro-sharing. Perhaps a new web 2.0 genre is born here.