
Google Steps Where Many Have Stumbled: Sidewiki - vaksel
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/09/23/google-steps-where-many-have-stumbled-sidewiki/
======
lzimm
By having a large enough install base, they just might be the first to
actually execute the idea successfully enough to really make it useful. I
guess the major problem that's always been there with this kinda stuff in the
past is that its just so inconvenient. But having it integrated directly into
the browser (by default?) kind of axes that qualm -- plus the whole "age of
twitter" thing, with our growing habit of blasting updates back and forth
about your every moment helps a lot. Allowing your friends to easily join in
the conversation can really help you feel like you aren't just shouting into
the abyss.

The only thing that I still question whenever I see this stuff (including one
of my own projects, so maybe I'm biased), is whether or not it meshes with the
way we really communicate, and if it fits with the way we'd best want to leave
our marks when annotating the web.

I mean, its obvious that we'd want to be able to see what's out there in the
universe of all available conversations for what we're looking at, but does
that mean its best to keep them all in a single stream, which is what it looks
like sidewiki wants? And moreover, does that really just boil down into a
triviality in implementation details? Or is it something more? Do we need to
start re-examining the nature of how we comment? Maybe the single page
collection idea works well for blogs and stuff like that because we're more or
less being co-ordinated by the original author (and the conversation that
grows out of the seed they planted), but when we start annotating, we aren't
necessarily going to be discussing things in nearly the same frame as the meme
generated by a page at large.

Maybe I don't want to talk about missiles on a link dedicated missiles. Maybe
there was something in the article that sparked off something tangental (I
can't spell, or even tell if that's a real word, sorry) about transportation,
or energy, or something that would just be lost if I just let it drip into the
chaotic conversation that 4chan drove towards jihad on its sidewiki page. The
"implementation detail" way of resolving the issue is just to silo up
conversations, but still allow people to find the common root that links them
all together, so you don't always start at zero. And that's fine, a page can
very easily have a 1-N relationship with its impending streams of thought,
just like bit.ly lets links have 1-N shortlinks that pad our individual egos,
but still tracks the traffic generated to the destination in aggregate.

But what about N-1? N-N? Things start getting really interesting. To me, its
interesting on the scale of pagerank.

------
omouse
If you're going to annotate the web, please do it properly and have different
layers. As in, let me select whose annotations I'd like to see. Order of
importance of the annotations for me is: mine, site owner's,
friends'/favourites'/bookmarked-peoples', everyone else's.

I don't understand why they flatten out the annotations and toss them into a
universal dump.

~~~
bravura
That's not necessarily the right way to do it.

To formalize the problems, assume that Wikipedia was intended to be subjective
and that editors are potentially malicious. So some edits in the middle of a
changeset might be malicious, but children edits are legitimate. So you want
to delete the malicious edits but preserve the dangling child edit. What is
the correct way to reconcile this changeset?

Once you answer the above question, you can soften the intepretation of
malicious to: Users that I would rather filter, because their opinions are
stupid to me or because I consider them spammers.

~~~
omouse
Well see, the right way to do it is to have a single original document that
represents a single version so that the annotation only applies to it. Of
course this requires changing the whole web because there's no such thing as
version control on it :)

------
Tichy
Interesting, but I stopped reading at "Sidewiki is part of Google Toolbar".

------
psranga
Many sites already provide (1) a _HUGE_ number of "share" buttons to post to
facebook, reddit etc, and (2) the ability to comment and have it appear below
the article.

If you want to comment to your immediate circle use option (1). To comment to
the whole world use (2).

I don't understand the motivation behind this app. Remember Third Voice came
before (1) and (2) were popular.

Google needs it's content partners for Adsense, and I'm not sure how they're
going to feel about random annotations on their content.

------
jerf
"It’s unlikely that websites will have the same visceral reaction today that
they did to Third Voice a decade ago."

Yes, because IP issues (which I'm using as a catchall term, not as a
commentary on the validity of any particular issue) on the Internet sure have
cooled down since 2001.

Wanna bet nobody will react?

------
diN0bot
i read a sci fi story recently in Asimov's in which every activity was
rankable. it tracked a young man's attempts to "become somebody". he got to
124,425th in yoyo, 513,130th in honey making, 23,098th in blah. you get the
point.

the story was a bit cliche in its ending: the young man, in his latest quest
to become the world's best lover, is befriended by a young woman who avoids
public recordings and doesn't give a damn about ranks. he finds enjoyment in
learning how to juggle even though he is terrible.

the story is neither here nor there; i'm just thinking about the future.

note: if the real future, the rankings will be broken down by age, ethnicity,
and some much particulars. why stop at 3 billion categories when you can slice
it into 30 billion?

------
boundlessdreamz
My friend has been working on startup with a similar idea for sometime and
they launched couple of months back. <http://www.tiseme.com/>

