Google Steps Where Many Have Stumbled: Sidewiki(techcrunch.com)
techcrunch.com
Google Steps Where Many Have Stumbled: Sidewiki
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/09/23/google-steps-where-many-have-stumbled-sidewiki/
8 comments
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.
I don't understand why they flatten out the annotations and toss them into a universal dump.
What you are asking is similar to Google FriendConnect features, which is what I believe Google will try to do.
Instead of waiting for websites to add FriendConnect widgets, a browser addon enables Google to provide those features on every website.
Similarly, even if AdSense is not going to be added on those websites, relevant ads can still be shown on the sidewiki. So, Google now gets to show AdSense on Microsoft/Apple's website.
Instead of waiting for websites to add FriendConnect widgets, a browser addon enables Google to provide those features on every website.
Similarly, even if AdSense is not going to be added on those websites, relevant ads can still be shown on the sidewiki. So, Google now gets to show AdSense on Microsoft/Apple's website.
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.
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.
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 :)
or a universal topic dump. (my biggest pet peeve with hacker news)
Interesting, but I stopped reading at "Sidewiki is part of Google Toolbar".
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.
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.
"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?
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?
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?
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?
My friend has been working on startup with a similar idea for sometime and they launched couple of months back. http://www.tiseme.com/
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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.