I recently prototyped a Youtube annotation interface. It's based around the Hypothesis annotation service. Let's you annotate youtube transcripts (approx 95% coverage from what I can tell) inline w/ the video itself. Super early sketch in code. Controls to play the video and sync it to the transcript. Full transcript search for keywords, etc. It was a fun project. Code is at https://github.com/dwhly-proj/droppdf, major kudos to Paul Genho, who did the lifting. This is part of the overall document conversion, hosting and annotation service at docdrop.org-- which we'll incorporate natively into Hypothes.is.
You need to choose a YT video that has a auto-generated transcript. About 80%+ videos do I think. Choose another one. Docdrop+Hypothesis only works on transcripts-- it's not a timecode video annotator.
This statement that "If you want to build a commons, first you have to have something to share" doesn't relate in any way to a need to own this concept. Trademarking "Internet of Agreements" doesn't somehow give you more of "something to share", rather it gives you less. Whatever your reasons for capturing your IP, so that you can monetize and control it, generosity isn't among them IMHO.
What you're trying to do is define a space so that you can capture an outsized share of the attention and therefore the financial value from it. Plenty of people name spaces without needing that capture.
I disagree. Dealing with large volumes of annotations is a UX challenge, but a very solvable one. Certainly current implementations don't handle pages w/ 10s of thousands or millions of annotations (think: the bible), but neither do traditional comment widgets.
Happy to have a more thoughtful discussion if you're interested.
To state the obvious-- Hypothesis is eager, and is running one. If we can be so bold, we think we are also trustworthy. We knew that this could not work unless we also created a service.
The key difference is that proxy servers don't copy content. They reflect it. You can put any URL on the internet behind a proxy server-- that does not mean that the proxy server has already copied the entire internet. Nor does it mean that once a URL has been proxied by a proxy server does the content remain cached or copied-- since in our case at Hypothesis, and we presume at Genius, it does not.
This is a key distinction that separates proxies from caches and archives.
Also, it may not be readily apparent, but Hypothesis is a non-profit, particularly because we think this technology if ever widely deployed and integrated should be done in a way that aligns with the interests of citizens over the long term.
Hypothesis supports private "only me" annotations, as well as the ability to create ad-hoc private groups. Only about 24% of annotations made through our service are public.
Part of the goal of making it a standard, and one in particular where annotation clients could listen to multiple annotation service providers, is precisely to avoid "Annotation Central". Our client does not currently operate this way, but our intention is to move that direction this year. Many underlying architectural changes are being made now to support that change.
Certainly if browsers integrate annotation natively, it would increase the discoverability of conversation considerably which is of course the point.
I personally think if that is done it should require the user to purposely choose an annotation service as well. The actual act of inviting the conversation to pages should involve a user choice.
See further thoughts on the question of page owner consent-to-be-annotated in another of my replies above.
In terms of controlling for trolls/spam, etc annotation service providers will need to use the same combination of automatic filtering and editorial or community moderation that are relied on widely elsewhere. The success of any individual service will presumably at least partly depend on how good of a job they do.
Ultimately annotation is something that readers choose to enable by adding to their browser, and by choosing the service they prefer-- just as they may elect to have a discussion about the page on reddit, twitter, facebook, etc.
With regard to whether sites should be able to have editorial privileges on their own domain, or to what degree should page owners have consent over annotation, we've blogged about that here: https://hypothes.is/blog/involving-page-owners-in-annotation...
There's a wide diversity of opinion. Some suggested a flag where site owners could register their preference not to be annotated. Overriding that flag would invite additional scrutiny from moderators. Others have suggested that such a flag not be able to be overridden.
I'm the founder of Hypothes.is, and here to say that we're delighted for researchers us to use us in this way. So far, our primary emphasis has been on collaborative annotation with others on documents vs individual annotation. That said, we hope to layer on additional features where appropriate, and to collaborate with other products and services when we can--particularly ones that support open standards and open source software.
They're "permanent" in that they're not controlled by the site owners. But without effective moderation, a public channel of annotations will become unusable, so spam and trolls must be dealt with effectively.