Why The 📝 Emoji?
As was about 📝Contextual Augmentation in the thread of 📝My Mildly Interesting Storyboard:
This is probably a dumb question but how is this different than using a link to define a word?
It's not a dumb question, it's a great question. And, surprisingly (to me) it's an infrequently asked one.
When I was playing with augmented emails early on, I noticed that sending hyperlinks alone (without the memo emoji proceeding each link), it made my emails look like they were begging for attention. People assumed that I'd laboriously linked each and every one. Similar to 📝The Paradox of Templates.
The 📝 emoji demarcated that the link was auto-inserted on my end and showed that "context for this already exists and you're welcome to see it." In my experience, people often believe that responses typed for them are trying to convince them specifically and/or have less importance/relevance. When it's shown that "all these links have context" it seems to help to showcase the transparency of the communication.