Casey has some thoughts on web page annotations. It’s a good read.
A distributed annotation service could be based on blogging technology. Annotation blogging would address most of Casey’s concerns, at the expense of some wheel-re-inventation.
Your typical blog entry has a title, text, a creation date, and a “permalink” URL that identifies the entry. An annotation entry would have those attributes, as well as the URL of the annotated page.
I would publish my annotation entries on my website, and my friends would publish their annotation entries on their websites. When I browse a page that has been annotated by my friends, my annotation-aware browser would download my friend’s annotations and display them.
Threaded discussions in page annotations could be added by allowing one annotation to refer to another. This extension would also help annotaters to find other annotaters they might be interested in subscribing to.
The Third Voice annotation system that Casey describes suffered because it did not have a good mechanism for viewing just those annotations from credible sources. With annotation blogging, the source of annotations is as credible as a blog entry—which is good enough for most on-line community purposes.
Annotation blogging would encourage lively communities to form around news sites and popular pundits. Annotation and regular blogging would work in parallel, with blogs containing both annotations and regular entries. It would bring the blogosphere closer to mainstream current affairs.
The technological basis for annotation blogging is in place. If an enthusiastic bunch of programmers got working on it, we could all be annotation blogging by Christmas.
Well, it’s a nice thought.
Comments
This guy's thinking about this stuff too:
http://blog.voiceofhumanity.net/
Thanks for picking this up, Alan :-)
Current blog technology is sufficient, but not necessarily suitable, to perform web annotation. A set of annotations can just be aggregated from separate sources.
The extra information required to turn a current blog entry into an annotation is, at minimum, the URL of the target page, but could also include details about the position on the page etc.
The drawback of using separate sources (blogs) for the page is that it cannot become a narrative - it's not obvious how one entry can reference / follow on from another. Perhaps someone has made a comment that you'd like to disagree with, or comment on further - if you write it in your own blog, you've lost context, and if you write it in their blog's comments, it won't be shown on the aggregated page (usually).
I have a feeling that web annotation will happen again, and because of the current positive atmosphere around web content creation, it will succeed where it failed previously.
Pointers from later annotations to earlier annotations are easy - another URL in the blog entry. Pointers from earlier annotations to later ones could be done with a trackback-like mechanism. Trackback authentication - http://www.intertwingly.net/blog/1725.html - would be a must.
An annotation aware browser could show a fully threaded view, but the conversation would be available to regular browsers too, via standard backward and forward links.
I'll throw together an email once I've thought about it a bit more. Better still, how about we discuss it over beer?