InLine is a news-sharing service with inline comments. Users can submit URLs from around the web, annotate articles other users have shared, and recommend related articles.

Think Rap Genius meets Reddit.

The articles are organized around "beats", communities of people who are interested in a particular topic like "biology" or "US politics".

Inline will be a resource for people who want start discussions and find out how random articles they've stumbled across on the web fit into the bigger picture.

But if you've ever googled or Wikipedia'd the name of a chemical, you know there's a good chance that a lot of the top hits are going to be in incomprehensible biochem babble, and you don't have time to teach yourself biochem online. So what do you do? You post it on a Beat about either chemistry, health, or medicine.

You'd pick a beat where a there's a good chance that the other people on your beat will include chemistry and med students who might know some cool resources or other interesting articles about the drugs she brings up in the original blog post.

(And you can probably imagine, if you submitted it to Reddit, you'd probably get lots of random arguments in the comments and probably not as many useful links to stuff that would help you learn more-- unless you left a comment or something specifically asking people for further reading recommendations...)

But with InLine, you can start a conversation, ask about specific aspects of the article that confused you, and get links to interesting further reading...

We call our communities "beats", because everyone on the beat is an active participant in the news cycle.

Everyone can be a curator; everyone can contribute to the discussion