Facts: With the increasing popularity of the "web 2.0", internet users are invited to get involved with the content proposed on web sites by annotating, commenting, tagging… This way, information is reviewed and linked to other resources, helping people to learn and navigate in a more intuitious way - because these annotations are human.

BUT such annotations are found on specific websites, e.g. YouTube for videos, del.icio.us for bookmarks, Last.fm for music, and so on…

Challenge: What about bringing human annotations to another level by generalizing it to any kind of information and pushing it to the user when relevant, without expecting him to look for it on specialized websites?

Uses cases:

  1. Reviewing resources and sharing opinions
  2. Warning about resources: "content is not up-to-date" etc…
  3. Linking to other human-relevant resources
  4. Creating communities: meeting other visitors
Existing solutions?

  • Yakalike, Chatsum and many other services intergrate your favorite browser to chat with other people visiting the same page as you. This is an interresting solution for all of the 4 proposed use cases, but there are some drawbacks:
  • the lack of popularity (too few users installed the software) prevents the idea from taking off
  • the identification of a "page" is based on its URL, which can be irrelevant (especially with web 2.0 apps?)
  • this chat program, as a browser extension, may be too intrusive for permanent use: too much space is wasted, sometimes for nothing
  • Blogger Web Comments is another browser extension which notifies the user (by a small icon) when the visited page is commented in blogs, allowing her/him to consult the relevant posts. This approach is less intrusive and relying on blogs, which are commonly used nowadays, but also has its drawbacks:
  • this add-on only relies on blogs hosted by Blogger.com, limitation that is not acceptable since it would chunk the information for each blog host
  • commenting on a page consists in posting in your blog, and this blog must be hosted by Blogger.com. is a small note worth a post on your blog?
  • Del.icio.us and other bookmark sharing communities are services that invite users to submit their bookmarks on their account by tagging them. By sharing them with the community, we can evaluate the popularity of a website, discover new websites related with certain tags and read user reviews. We can also consult the people who tagged a bookmark to interact with them. This approach is very popular and interresting but:
  • you have to go on the del.icio.us website in order to browse this information
  • tags are not necessarly efficient: their are sometimes subjective (synonyms and interpretations) and culture-dependant (translations), this may result in improving ranking bookmarks which are trivial to tag and forgetting content which is not easily categorizable but valuable.
  • like a few people, I like to keep my bookmarks stored locally too, and I don’t know about any possible synchronization between del.icio.us and Firefox. It would be hard anyway since browsers use hierarchical categorization while del.icio.us use tags.
Discussion

I like the idea of chatting with people concerned with certain websites, when they could represent an interresting community, but I think that this concept should not be integrated in all cases. In the blog approach, I like the fact that the user can be notified if some annotations were identified about the website which is currently visited, this is less intrusive. Unfortunately, it also too specific because most interresting annotations are not worth a post on your personal blog. Nevertheless, del.icio.us, as a bookmark sharing service, is the perfect place to store these annotations. But the current service is sticking to its website too much, forcing users to look for information instead of the information being brought to her/him.

A perfect approach?

I think that annotations should be proposed to the user when browsing websites or consulting results of a search engine. In the case of the search engine, these annotations should have an influence on the ranking of the results, by the way. In the browsing side, an extension should connect to a service like del.icio.us to propose sticky notes, a link to an irc channel (chat), human-entered links to related resources and other ranked annotations about this page. The sticky notes and the proposed chat channel must be elected democratically by user vote, favorizing commonly agreed and concise information. The sticky notes would consist in objective information, like the current status of the the content: telling if it’s not up-to-date for example. Any other annotation would remain in a list in which users can rank them (like in Digg). Adding a bookmark would propose to the user to rank the annotation which best describes the content. Ideally, we’ll find a more efficient way than tags or hierarchies to classify bookmarks both locally in your browser and remotely on the bookmark sharing service on the internet.