Zotero, COinS and Slaw

I’ve blogged a couple of times already about Zotero, that impressive Firefox extension that operates as a note-taker and bibliographic software. Zotero can tell when you’re viewing a book or an article or, now, a legal judgment, but until recently it had no category, if you like, for blog entry. That’s changed.

COinS (ContextObjects in Spans) is a simple way of embedding citation metadata in web pages. Zotero developed a WordPress plugin that uses the COinS specification for making basic metadata available to it. ((There seems to be a problem with the way the plugin interacts with version 2.2.2 of WordPress, so I directly modified the templates to offer up the metadata.)) Now, if you have Zotero installed, when you come to Slaw you’ll see either a folder icon to the left of the RSS icon, signifying a number of blog entries on the page:

or a page icon, signifying a single blog entry on the page:

A click on either lets you capture the essential metadata, as you see in the graphic below. (Category assignments are recorded as tags and filed under the Tags tab.)