23 January 2013

Reuters: “Are annotations the new comments?”

Recently, two different people told me on the same day that they were going to launch a comments section based on annotations — where readers comment on individual sentences or paragraphs or arguments, rather than a story or post as a whole.
The promise here is twofold: it helps the conversation stay on topic, and it also raises the possibility of really improving the original post, keeping it updated and accurate, all through crowdsourced technology. Felix Salmon

Hmm, this remind me of something… can’t quite put my finger on it

I personally like the concept, but I think it will be very hard to “get right”. Put too many annotations on the article and the original content gets lost in a sea of noise; show too few and people won’t even notice them, making it hard for the project to take off. And how will the increased information density fit into a mobile webpage? tried something like that once with SideWiki and didn’t get much traction.

via Marcel Weiß

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