Trying To Make Website Annotation Cool Again

Overhype

from the try-try-try dept

Website annotation software isn’t new at all. It’s been around for years — though, it hasn’t taken off very much. In the late 90s, lots of folks were talking about ThirdVoice which allowed you to annotate pages, which made lots of web publishers quite angry — as they didn’t want anyone touching their content. However, Paul Boutin is making an effort to make web annotating cool again by renaming it “newsmashing,” and saying it could be a useful tool for political bloggers who want to comment directly about an article on the web without having to post an entirely separate blog post on it. He does note that some users would obviously get upset about this — especially those who freaked out over Google’s autolinks (which really is a very limited annotation system). Ernest Miller takes this a step further and points out that it could run into legal questions about copyright infringement for creating derivative works. While there is the “tragedy of the commons” issue of too much annotation and graffiti on a website, it does seem like an interesting idea. However, with history showing that people really aren’t that into annotation products, and the need for everyone to agree on a single standard, it seems unlikely to catch on any time soon.