Rap Genius Changes Its Name, Wants To Annotate The World

Rap Genius has been a force in the mutually contributive lyric annotation world for the past few years, but in a declarative move, changed its name to simply "Genius" in an effort to establish itself as a platform for annotating text outside of the rap world through a newly developed "embeddable annotation." The short-standing king of the lyric-annotation game got some much needed boosts in funding to launch the campaign, including a recent push of $40 million from Dan Gilbert (majority owner of the re-Lebron-ified Cleveland Cavaliers) adding to previous investments from Horowitz brothers Andreessen and Ben.

The latter of the two once dreamed of annotating scripts from the news, poetry, literature and really anything that could be digitally published with his own revolutionary start-up Netscape (aka one of the very first internet browsers for those millennials out there.) Have I longed for the opportunity to add my two cents to Plato's cave metaphor? Yes. Do I think that anyone who has a thought on a historical text should have the opportunity to vocalize it alongside scholars? Probably not. We'll see how all this embeddable annotation madness plays out in the months to come, but in the meantime keep your eyes to the realm, as we'll certainly have the latest developments.