One of the hot areas on the Internet today is social bookmarks. Social bookmarks are public entries that individuals make about a particular web page. These entries typically include one or more tags (labels) and a comment summarizing the page. Many people can create entries for the same page and they can use the same tags or different tags. People can find content related to their own interests by browsing the entries and tags created by others.
Pearl Comments does share many of the same features (entries about web pages that have labels and comments) but I hesitate to categorize it as a social bookmarking tool. Why not? Because Pearl Comments is typically used within a closed workgroup where the entries are not public.
One aspect of Pearl Comments that goes beyond most other bookmarking tools is its capability to track not just the URL of the page being commented on, but a portion of the page as well. We refer to this as pinpointing. In Pearl Comments, pinpointing is accomplished by making a selection on the page before adding a new comment (#anchors that appear at the end of URLs are tracked as well). Later when someone views the comment, the original selection is restored and the page is scrolled to show the selected area. With pinpointing, everyone can see exactly which portion of a page a comment applies to, which lends more precision to the conversation.