Annotating a book as a weblog

I’m toying with a small project that I think is quite interesting. A while ago, I learned that Richard Gabriel had released his book Patterns of Software for free (PDF). It doesn’t say so on his site or in the PDF yet, but his intention (I mailed him about this) was to release it under the same Creative Commons license that most of his other material is made available under. This gave me the idea to annotate it as I’m reading it.

Then I thought about publishing an RSS feed along with the annotated book, where each item would point to an annotation. This is an interesting variation of the weblog concept. The front page would perhaps aggregate the latest n annotations, which can be clicked to visit the annotated passage.

This is different from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, which is a regular weblog with the annotations as comments—but then again, that book is a diary and thus arranged chronologically from the start.

My idea is to copy the book and write the annotations as Python code, and refactor as I go, so perhaps I will end up with code that can be reused for future annotations of other books, by myself or others.