

HN Rate My Idea: Socratic Linking - DanielBMarkham
http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2009/07/blue-sky-startu.php

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jerf
Many things implement something like this, or have in the past. It turns out
critical mass is extremely difficult to obtain; it's not the traditional
meaning of "boil the ocean" but it shares many of the same characteristics.
Even very large and funded efforts did not succeed.

You also will face extraordinary resistance if you become large enough to
matter; many people will consider it a violation of their site, and will claim
it's illegal. Eventually some will try that out in court, if you make money.
You'll get people like me claiming it's unethical, and pointing out that if
you do succeed and legitimize the idea that it's ok to lay things over other
people's sites regardless of how they feel about it that you can count on
Comcast and AT&T jumping on that capability to use it in ways you won't like,
and that in the end we're all better off leaving web pages alone.

But, really, my main point to you personally is that this has been tried
repeatedly and if you want to build something successful you really ought to
examine the history and figure out what it is that would be so different about
your approach that it might work.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
Great comments, and I agree with all of them (although I do not consider
myself deterred. After all, the point was to get feedback, see if anybody was
interested)

The best comment so far that I've heard is to begin implementation in a walled
garden in niche subject area. See if that works, then expand a bit at time
into larger (and foreign) sites.

There's a fascinating question here about who owns what part of the content.
If you write something, you own it, but if I say something to my friend like
"check out jerf's last blog beginning about half way down -- that really
pissed me off" obviously that content is mine. Now the interesting part is:
who owns the connection between those two concepts? I don't think it can be
you. ???

~~~
revorad
>begin implementation in a walled garden

Why don't you start experimenting with your own blog?

~~~
DanielBMarkham
I was thinking a custom site, set up around a small niche where users "drill
down" from entry to entry.

Perhaps a product review site.

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bkhn
I have a couple of ideas for you, to potentially make it more feasible /
faster to implement.

Two problems:

1) A lot of these sites that you refer to are small and the chance of multiple
users of a FF plugin going to that site might be unlikely.

2) Unless you have a lot of experience with FF plugins, it sounds like a lot
of work for something you may just want to experiment with.

So,

1) Make it a destination site, with a simple bookmarklet for grabbing the text
and adding questions, etc. It takes 2 minutes to make a bookmarklet that can
grab text and will work with more browsers than FF.

2) This way, you also expose neat questions/ideas that are ripe for
discussion, from a series of small sites that might otherwise go undiscovered.

I understand it's not quite the same, but for a small project, proof of
concept, it's a day or two of coding instead of a huge commitment, and it
works well even if you have a tiny number of users.

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jacquesm
Hey Daniel,

There are services (like 'fleck' or 'diigo' not sure if they are still
working) that allow you to stick post-it like notes on top of webpages, that
has quite a bit of the functionality you describe.

It sounds like a firefox plugin would do the job.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
Thanks for the read, jacquesm.

I knew there were basic "post-it" kinds of apps out there, but I didn't think
any of them combined the wiki and emotional response slants. For instance,
Discus does site commenting and tracking (along with CoComment and others).
What's missing to me is the cross-linking between sites based on topic area.

The HN question I was expecting was "Sounds cool. How are you going to
monetize this? To which I have no answer.

Just seemed like a neat concept, so I thought I'd throw it out there so you
guys could throw rocks at it.

~~~
jacquesm
I think it is a very neat concept, and not everything has to make money to be
successful (see youtube), as long as someone with pockets deep enough believes
in it.

The reason I mentioned the post-its is because your idea seems to be a special
case of those, you could easily extend such a post-it like application to
become what you describe.

One really sad thing is that with all the cross-site scripting jerks out there
some of the nicest things that you could do with javascript (layers on top of
other websites) are no longer possible.

I've been playing around with something like that on cameria.com (now
absolutely defunct, but I do still have all the code in a repository
somewhere) which basically dropped a chatroom on top of every website where
you wanted one, using little avatars and balloons.

The idea was to recreate the feeling that you have when you visit a mall or a
store but then to apply that to a website, you'd basically 'see the crowd' of
the other people visiting that site (limited to some geographical filter and a
maximum number of users).

This also allowed all kinds of interesting bits like crowdsurfing (before it
had a name) and 'guided tours' across the internet.

Alas, the 'holes' in javascript (that I thought were neat features) got closed
to stop cross-site scripting attacks and the project died.

So now everybody that wants to do any kind of layering has to either have a
friendly relationship with the website that they want to display the layer on
(for instance analytics makes use of this through their tag) or you have to
cache the data and spit it back out.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
I did something like this a couple of years ago with a blog toolkit. Basically
you signed up, added some javascript, and then we could come into the client
during page load and provide all kinds of interactive stuff on top of your
blog page.

Back then we just loaded JSON in javascript from a foreign server. I'd be
surprised if that loophole was closed because if you can't load JS from a
foreign server lots of stuff is not going to work anymore (like Google
analytics)

~~~
jacquesm
That's what I meant with the 'friendly relationship', the owner of the page
has to place a tag. But what I was getting at was on _any_ page, regardless of
tags, simply by embedding the page in a frame and then accessing the content
of the foreign frame. That is - alas - no longer possible because it causes
security issues.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
Can't you just drop a JS link into the page on load from a plug-in? I think
that would work.

~~~
jacquesm
Yes, but that requires the installation of a plug-in and I wanted to avoid
that kind of change.

The reason is that as soon as your project requires a plug in or a download
the size of the 'universe' is only a fraction of what it would be otherwise.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
Wonder if you could do it via js insertion in something like adsense? Probably
not that particular product, but most pages get JS from all sorts of places.
Lots of opportunities to piggy-back.

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natch
First, this is from another of your startups, but it bothers me: "Measuring
Process Quality By Means Of A Technical Opinion Survey" is patent pending at
the United States patent office."

Second (and hopefully more constructively) there have been many web page
annotation startups, which is not to say your idea is the same (it's not, as
far as I can tell). But it might be useful to think about your idea in terms
of features and versions, and ask yourself: if my version 1.0 release looks
like what some other startup has had at some point, then why did that other
startup not ultimately evolve to my final idea? Is it just that they were not
smart, or were there good reasons the idea wouldn't fly?

Or maybe your thinking is you would just jump to full features on version
1.0... however, in that case, thinking about the above question might still
reveal some insights.

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CWuestefeld
I really don't get what it means to "sort" the text. Can you describe that
further?

Aside from that question, what you describe sounds a bit like the online
service SpinSpotter (which I think is a good idea, but severely underused).

~~~
DanielBMarkham
The old idea was to "rank" something. You voted up or down to indicate --
beats me -- you liked it, you wanted other people to see it, you like the
person, you're in a good mood. Whatever.

Instead of a single dimension, my idea is that internet content consists of
two things: keywords and emotional impact on the reader. So you tag the
content, giving it semantic value, and then click on various indicators
showing how it affected you emotionally.

So now I can provide you with associated material that is relevant and can
predicatively adapt to your moods, i.e. responses.

It's cool stuff, but basically it boils down to a souped-up version of
PageRank-like concepts.

I have a screen shot of a UI prototype but have to catch a plane right now.
Glad to put it up if anybody would like to see it.

~~~
CWuestefeld
Ahh, I get it. The user isn't actually _sorting_ , but providing input values
for a segment of text, that a sorting algorithm might use.

I was having visions of trying to parse sentence breaks, and then having users
shove the good sentences in the article to the top, and bad ones down. None of
which made any sense to me...

~~~
DanielBMarkham
Yep. So if the last three times you read something about Michael Jackson it
ticked you off, the system doesn't rank segments of text tagged with Michael
Jackson very highly the next time you search for related questions or
statements. To take it a step further, if you and I track closely when the
keyword phrase is "Sundance Film Festival", and I just read an article I found
hilarious, it's probably something you would enjoy as well.

There _is_ a bit of arm-waving going on here, I admit. But it's just a blue-
sky concept right now, so a little arm-waving can be forgiven (hopefullly).

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DanielStraight
Assuming everyone had this add-on (and we are talking about software, not just
a web service here), would every single query anyone made on any website in
the entire world have to hit your servers?

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bisceglie
check out ShiftSpace [<http://www.shiftspace.org>]

super cool project for enabling an internet-wide
dialogue/communication/modification-layer

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omouse
Overlays. The Web needs to be completely redesigned because HTML markup fucks
up overlays and it's difficult to have commenting/annotation, etc. with it.

~~~
IsaacL
The Web? I reckon you could hack a basic version in a weekend

~~~
omouse
Erm, I wouldn't say that ;) Maybe in less than 6 months, with a proper design.

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lucifer
<http://dotspots.com/>

