It appears that the funding for the development came from Nanyang Techonological University in Singapore. The system is maintained and kept current by numerous international volunteers who contribute content.
Users enter summaries of articles onto the website as well as replies on articles. Users also enter anti-spam information, email addresses, their names, and websites they may be associated with.
Students, professors, and others in academia appear to use the the site to blog about their experiences in Japan as it relates to diasters.
I'm not sure if other systems have been modeled off this one; however, it seems as though the Disaster STS network uses a similar system of annotating works in order to share their concepts and engage in discussions with others.
This system was built for academia worldwide to study the historical context behind technical and scientific issues related to large-scale disasters. They enhance the knowledge of scholars of where science and technology, history, and Asia meet. The site uses volunteers to translate various resources into English, Japanese, Korean, Bahasa Indonesia, and Chinese so many people can share in the knowledge that others have.
This system seems to rely upon Blogs@NTU to keep their system updated. They also rely upon plugins for social media in order to have their annotations shared on those respective platforms.
Users can voice interest in annotating or translating works to teach3eleven [at] gmail.com. The website operators maintain a listing of works that they would like annotated. Users can also share annotations via twitter, facebook, tumbler, google+, and email. Users are also able to comment on the articles directly on the website and can reply to eachothers comments for discussion there as well.
The system could be difficult to work with if you didn't speak any of the languages that the site is translated into. Addionally, if you want to anotate a source, it seems like the process to do so is somewhat convoluted. Besides that, it is mobile friendly and it has a decent user interface. So overall, it seems to be easy to work with.
The data is presented much like on Twitter or Facebook with a timeline showing the most recent information first with a small exerpt of the article and the ability to click on a "read more" button to view the article in full.
The App pairs translated annotations with their respective sources in a way for viewers to easily access. This information is used to convey the purpose of the source to others who may not speak the language in which the source is written.