The Internet is the world's greatest source of news and information. It's also the world's greatest source of factual errors. Genius offers readers an easy way to correct the record by making annotations on misleading web pages and sharing their marked up versions on social media.
To annotate any page, first "Genius it" by typing “genius.it/” before the URL. Once a page is Genius-activated, just highlight text and add your commentary. If you prefer, you can also Genius-activate any page by using the bookmarklet. I've heard Genius is in Beta. Can I still use it? Yes. We're still adding features and perfecting the interface, but anyone can request a Beta invitation at genius.com/beta. Do I need to be logged in to Genius to annotate? Yes. If you highlight text on a genius-activated page and you're not already logged in, you'll be prompted to do so. Why is annotating a good way to fact-check the Internet? Annotating allows you to address specific words and lines and to guide your readers through a series of errors or misleading statements. Instead of your corrections being confined to the comments section, the wilderness of social media, or your own website, Genius allows you to comment directly on top of errors, which levels the playing field and makes your corrections harder for the author to ignore. I've seen Genius users on some sites identified with their full name followed by “AUTHOR” or their occupation. How do I get that? If you want users identified by their real name rather than their screen name along with additional relevant information (e.g. if they're authors or experts), send an email user-activation@genius.com with the screen name of the user, the user's full name, however you'd like them to be ID'd, and the URL of the page you'd like them to be ID'd on. What's in it for Genius? Genius's goal is to create a more targeted, more distributed web by localizing sites of conversation on top of primary documents. In the process, we aim to cover the entire Internet with an extra layer. Our quest is lofty — not only a new kind of social media, but an infrastructural change to the way information and shared and processed online. Genius provides its technology free of charge to any website that wants to use it.