Trailmeme is officially launching at DEMOfall 2010, which kicks off today. The Xerox-incubated network, which first emerged late last year, lets you create sharable paths of collected content. Incorporating the process behind your research can be just as important as the data itself, particularly when it comes to conveying and comprehending the intent of the larger picture.

Trailmeme works by bookmarking sites as you surf the web, with several sharing and organizational tools included in this process. Each trail has its own set of markers, making a trail a combination of semantic search, bookmarklets and bibliographies. A trail can be ordered in any way you see fit, so that once it’s shared, other users have the experience you intended. Various actions can be taken around a given trail, such as annotations, so a great deal of context can be layered in as well.

The service itself has no clearly defined target groups, being as it’s useful for researchers and students, casual users and bloggers. By way of tools, Trailmeme has a browser add-on and WordPress plug-in, which has a number of useful features itself. Trailmeme’s WordPress integration can also double as a semantic search tool for a blog’s readers, or as an internal research function for the blogger himself.

It’s these specific features that give Trailmeme merit, so I hope to see more personalization around the tool sets in the future. Trailmeme currently touches on a number of trends, from real-time search to personalized search. It can act as a custom “news feed” as you receive updates for others’ trail additions, or as an archived map to cut through real-time search results.

It’s this particular method of curating that I find interesting and useful in today’s web environment, as Trailmeme isn’t exactly a new concept. But Venkatesh Rao, Entrerpreneur-in-Residence and Trailmeme Project Manager at Xerox Corporation, shared his take on existing consumer anxiety around many current real-time trends, telling me in a call last week that Trailmeme’s intent is to reduce that anxiety. Trailmeme is actually designed to not be anxiety-inducing, simplifying much of the labor around data collection.

In this regard, Trailmeme is well-suited for consumer use, but has a number of competitors taking shape of one form or another. Similar functions are being incorporated on a large scale, directly from Mozilla for the upcoming Firefox 4 browser, and plenty of initiatives coming from Google (i.e. GoogleMe). Nevertheless, this Xerox-supported research tool will do well with its split consumer interface and content creation service.  See the video welcome below.