81–90 of 164 posts
this will fundamentally change the internet
fundamentally change how?
I know Dan Whaley, the author of the post, personally. This is not about promoting a company. This is about allowing people with knowledge to combat fake news. He has been working to make annotation a web standard for years. The fake news that he, in particular, is worried about is climate change denial. The pages of the WSJ and much of the Web are riddled with BS. This annotation enablement will allow, for example,…
The climate change effort using Hypothesis is located at http://climatefeedback.org/
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.
In my opinion this will open up the web immensely and make the web much more democratic, will be interesting to see how major players react.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
fundamentally change how?
My guess is that It's going to improve the transparency and correctness of ideas. Every website will be like some sort of Reddit but more transparent because the publisher will not be able to censorship you. Also, cross identity. People will start having 1 public profile for every website. I can be Demi on hacker news, Reddit, Youtube, etc.
I think this is great news. As someone who blogs irregularly, I don't want to spend a ton of time integrating each discussion area into my site. This seems like it could lead to a very elligent way to automatically get that integration. It would be great to also get notified as discussion is happening in the various sites, without reading the spec, it's not clear to me if that's part of the standard.
For notification of comments on other pages you might be interested in the Webmention spec (which is a lot simpler and has some active use already), which is a modernized take on pingbacks by the community around indieweb.org: https://www.w3.org/TR/webmention (There even are tools already to get notifications about twitter mentions etc. via it)
Is anyone using these? The blog post is put out by a company I've never heard of, and the credits listed on it include nobody who works on a browser, no major websites, and no comment-widget company. Historically, web standards where a committee gets together and decides how a feature is going to look without the buy-in of users or browser vendors have a very poor track record of adoption. The way actually-successful…
> The way actually-successful web features get standardized is that users start clamoring for it, which leads someone to build a hacked-up JS implementation of it, which leads to a company founded around that hacked-up JS implementation, which leads to competition, which leads to browser vendors building it into the browser, which leads to an open standard. I'm more pessimistic. I'm wondering: Has there actually been…
(Note: Massive generalization of the project history though, including the part where I and other key project members worked at the browser vendors at various times. Having insiders at the browser vendors does massively help move a standard forward.)
A lot of startups/websites exist solely and sometimes to a large extend because there is no standard annotation capability on the web, e.g. Stumbleupon, Reddit, Hackernews! (Medium highlights), comment sections on any page (even NY Times articles!) Sites not having direct control over which comments should stay and surface to the top and which ones should go is going to be huge. In my opinion this will open up the we…
In the meantime, we can keep using Hacker News.
I wonder how Genius feels about this news. But they were the ones rooting for this future, so probably they will be happy I think.
Genius has done a lot of work on annotation pinning. I remember hearing Tom Lehman discuss it in their dev meetup series when they expanded to annotating the whole web. Still, I'm not sure that it actually took off on the greater web as lately it seems they're doubling down on rap content and industry connections. I haven't dug into how the standard addresses all of its edge cases yet, but I hope that it handles pinn…