caseyporn

Web Annotation: Reloaded

You know what the web's missing? Web annotation.

Didn't the last attempt fail, and the company got sued, and huge grassroots activist communities formed just to force it out of existence?

Well, yeah. But that's not to say it's not a good idea to try again. Here's a long-ish rant on the subject.

The Current Situation

So blogging is huge. According to the latest statistics, there are now actually more blogs than people. Which is the way it should be, considering blogs should be both aggregations and specialisations of everyone's contribution to world knowledge and experience. The basic formula for blog consumption is simple: you visit a blog, or some blog aggregation page, and you read other's comments, links, and stories. Before blogs turned into livejournals, they were commentary based around links: usually you would visit their source material as well. (Interestingly, in the time we will shortly be talking about, they thought the internet would remain a passive medium.)

This formula for consumption works well, and is very successful. One property of this approach is that, due to the fact that you only visit a small set of blogs, you only get links to some pages, and only some of the links to those pages you visit. There are many other people out there commenting about the same media, but you haven't seen it - either through choice, or ignorance.

Movable Type has the concept of the "trackback", best described by NTK as trackback: the referer logs you enter in manually". In some kind of blogtopian universe, where all content was published in a blog, and everyone patiently trackbacked everyone else, you'd get a total picture of the swarm of commentary and experience that surrounded every article. This is not the case. The web is, thankfully, a huge, freeform, and sprawling mess, beyond the scope of any content management system (even Plone, sorry guys).

Web Annotation: Round One

Step back in time to 1999. Those salad days, when internet retailers and middlemen were dropping cash vouchers from passing planes, and every DVD was selling for half cost price. Amazon had definitely not made a profit, and nobody was asking it to, either. Into this environment came a product called Third Voice, the first widespread attempt at web annotation.

The premise of web annotation is simple. While viewing a web page, you can make notes. (The current version of Opera lets you take notes, by the way, but they aren't associated with URLs). These notes could be you own style of "margin notes" - notes to yourself about the content of the page, or things to look into later, or famous last theorems. Next time you look at the page, your notes are there too. Add one cup of internet magic, and this becomes an ability to view other people's notes too.

This was the basis of Third Voice (TV). It was a browser plugin that, when you viewed any web page, checked to see what notes people had left there, and showed them too. You had the ability to leave notes (public and private) as well. You could "highlight" parts of the page's content and attach your note to that, too. TV attracted a large amount of publicity, and an increasing amount of it was negative.

What was most problematic was the way that TV displayed these notes: as grafitti-styled writings over the original content. I can't find any screenshots of TV in action, but one of the issues that many people had was that this "defaced" the website, or changed it without permission. The original page had not been changed in anyway, but its appearance had been changed, presumably with the permission of the viewer who installed the plug-in.

The other problem with TV was the content of the notes left on pages. Much of it was crude graffiti (of the "CD waz here 1999" style favoured by tree-carvers for centuries), or spam, pornographic or otherwise. The content filtering system of TV was rudimentary, allowing notes to be public or private, and notes could be flagged as "trash".

Third Voice died, but not before raising the ire of groups such as Say NO to TV, and spawning anti-TV software such as Simply NO TV. It attracted a lot of attention: this article references a Time article, of all things.

In the end, they died not from a lawsuit or from consumer dissent, but from a lack of funding, a change of direction, and general dot-com malaise. Bye-bye, Third Voice. You probably weren't even missed that much.

Doing Web Annotation Properly

Third Voice's implementation was not the only way that web annotation can be done. I think that there is a lot of value in the core ideas, and that the web is ripe for a new implementation of a web annotation service.

First, to get an idea of how the service should behave, let's start with the problems that TV had.

The issue of defacement and copyright is pretty serious, and I Am Not A Lawyer and I'm not touching it. The safest option is also the simplest: don't change the appearance of the host web page at all. This would mean that the notes would have to be displayed separately. Luckily, browsers have acquainted users with the notion of the sidebar. Notes can be displayed in the sidebar, in a format just like the blogs we are all so familar with.

The second issue is content management. One aspect is getting rid of abuse and spam, but more generally we can look to customising the set of notes based on the user profile. It's not unreasonable to expect a user's profile to consist of some preferences based on moderation ("show me well-regarded posts"), buddies ("all posts by my buddies, none from my blacklist"), plus intrinsic qualities of the post ("only new comments").

Depending on your ambitions, the notes pages are basically a single web-forum page, maybe combined with your favourite social networking program and/or instant messenger. Many different approaches to the abuse / moderation issue have been proposed and implemented before, there's no need to reinvent the wheel *again*.

But if people place their comments in web annotations, what happens to their precious blogs? Fear not. Automated cross-posting or simple aggregation would make it easy for all annotations to turn up as (fully referenced) blog entries. Phew!

So...

In short, I think the time is ripe for the rebirth of a (suitably polite) web annotation service on the web. One of the benefits is that the comments are stored independently of the content owner, so it makes it harder for sites to censor unfavourable or controversial discussions.

One thing I don't know, though, is how to make money out of it. Ideas?

Posted by Casey at March 5, 2004 02:05 PM