Patent ID: 8479004

Claim:
A method comprising: sequentially examining identified locations of a document in a prioritized ordering of a list that contains a plurality of document locations that are statistically more likely to contain a machine readable code than document locations that are not in the list, wherein each identified location in the prioritized ordering of the list corresponds to a particular region on a page of the document, and wherein the prioritized ordering of identified locations to be examined is prioritized based on a determined layout of content within the document; scanning bits of the document; generating, with a processor, a cryptographic hash from the scanned bits of the document, the cryptographic hash identifying the document for document logging; converting the cryptographic hash into the machine readable code; rewriting the document with the code contained in a region of the document corresponding to a first identified location in the prioritized ordering of the list of identified locations where the region is empty; and using the cryptographic hash as an identifier to a document log with one or more sets of metadata entries associated with the document, wherein each of the one or more sets of metadata entries are sets of related user generated comments that are associated with the document.