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Google Sidewiki

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Re: Google Sidewiki

#51

Post by paradaux »

crazygringo wrote: post #42

I also desperately want something like this to succeed. I want to be able to see others' reactions on all NYTimes articles, for example, not just the handful each day they enable comments on, or the occasional one submitted to HN. And I want it to have all of the standard functionality -- hierarchical comments (like HN and Reddit), upvoting and downvoting, auto-collapsing tangential threads with less votes (like Redd…

Your url comment reminds me of the concept of the semantic web [0] Whereby we can have a structured machine readable and pure URL structure backed by ontology and linked data. There's a project that is working on this for Wikipedia called Dbpedia. [1]

[0] Unfortunately this concept has been completely bastardized by random research groups shoehorning the technology for EU grants, from my experience working in one such group.

[1] https://www.dbpedia.org/

Re: Google Sidewiki

#52

Post by jasfi »

hospitalJail wrote: post #2

This sounds great. Although, we basically have the same thing when people share links and people comment on them. Classic Google though. Gosh Google was the chosen one, how far they have fallen.

The tool was discontinued because site owners didn't like people creating sideways content without anything they could do about it. E.g. moderation.

Re: Google Sidewiki

#55

Post by TillE »

crazygringo wrote: post #42

I also desperately want something like this to succeed. I want to be able to see others' reactions on all NYTimes articles, for example, not just the handful each day they enable comments on, or the occasional one submitted to HN. And I want it to have all of the standard functionality -- hierarchical comments (like HN and Reddit), upvoting and downvoting, auto-collapsing tangential threads with less votes (like Redd…

Funny, I've always hated scrolling down and accidentally seeing comments on news articles, which are almost uniformly garbage. I think it's a terrible way to present any kind of serious story, it makes for a worse experience.

If I want to discuss an article, there's Twitter, Reddit, etc. The NYT used to have a good public editor (Margaret Sullivan) you could complain to, but she's long gone.

I will say that The Verge has a good approach, where there's a comment section on every story but it's hidden behind a button at the bottom you have to actively click. That's a fine compromise.

Re: Google Sidewiki

#56

Post by tannhaeuser »

alexghr wrote: post #6
hexage1814 wrote: post #3

I remember this, I always found the concept fascinating. But looking back, looking at what the web has become, there was no chance this could have ever worked. At best, it being centralized, it would have become essentially a Google controled social-media-ish space where all the "inconvenient" comments would be removed anyway. Probably Google would even disable the comments on some pages, like disabling sidewiki comm…

Just raising this since people might not know about it, but this is a Web standard now https://www.w3.org/annotation/ . There are a couple of companies which have created browser plugins for this.

There's also a competing W3C standard named Webmention [1] based on WordPress' pingback/linkback protocols [2] which in turn were based on XML-RPC and exploited for DDoS attacks, like most things WordPress (it's one of the reasons your http access logs are chock full of 404s for xmlrpc.php). AFAICS, pingback remains the most used method though, or the only one that ever went mainstream before web commenting consolidated onto a couple news aggregators, HN and reddit among them.

The Web annotations protocol has been published as W3C spec in 2016 already (so not "now"), and, as a child of its time, uses god-awful JSON-LD, just like previous W3C specs chased XML whether it was a good fit or not when exchange of text data is one of the actual use cases for markup languages.

Is there an English word for always getting it wrong and blindly promoting formats? In German, there's the term Schlaglochsuchmaschine (pot hole search engine) as a metaphor borrowed from the automotive domain.

[1|: https://www.w3.org/TR/webmention/

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pingback

Re: Google Sidewiki

#57

Post by nlawalker »

I was just thinking about how I wanted something like this the other day - like a lot of other PM-type people at my work, quite a bit of my output is "docs and decks", which I have found carry around a strong "work in progress" vibe. Whether you're sharing one out on your screen in a video call or sending it to someone so they can open it themselves, it's impossible to make a piece of work feel like a finished product, it always feels like a workspace.

I'd love to start publishing stuff in the form of static websites or another similar medium, but Word's ability to add annotations to specific runs of text and allow for conversations on them is a must-have.

Re: Google Sidewiki

#58

Post by xnx »

codetrotter wrote: post #27
xnx wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Although, we basically have the same thing when people share links and people comment on them. True, but having the comments appear naturally in context makes all the difference. Imagine seeing comments/corrections on a New York Times article that aren't moderated by the paper, or comments on a real estate listing that list all the problems that the listing omits, or reviews of a show on Netflix, etc.

> real estate listing that list all the problems that the listing omits For rental properties, or for houses for sale you mean?

Both! I see a lot of real estate listings where I'm sure the average browser is unaware that a large construction project is about to begin on an adjacent property and ruin their views. For rental listings, prospective tenants might not know about excessive noise from a nearby road.

Re: Google Sidewiki

#59

Post by rektide »

alexghr wrote: post #6
hexage1814 wrote: post #3

I remember this, I always found the concept fascinating. But looking back, looking at what the web has become, there was no chance this could have ever worked. At best, it being centralized, it would have become essentially a Google controled social-media-ish space where all the "inconvenient" comments would be removed anyway. Probably Google would even disable the comments on some pages, like disabling sidewiki comm…

Just raising this since people might not know about it, but this is a Web standard now https://www.w3.org/annotation/ . There are a couple of companies which have created browser plugins for this.

Web Annotations spec is a great starting place & I hope we can some day see some real breakout wins from it. I'd love to see some cross integration with ActivityPub, as a syndication/transport!

What I really want is no site to win; true success doesn't come from centralized solutions. Each user should have their own annotation feed!

What I'd love to see is something like the return of blogrolls, an annotater's list of people they follow. Users promoting users. A good extension could let us do a N-degrees exploration, let us see comments of people we follow, people they follow, people those people follow... Expanding the network & implicitly suggesting to us other people we might want to follow.

I personally really really loved the social aspect of del.icio.us. Finding other people who were searching deep for interesting content was something I spent time on & it rewarded me handsomely, back in the day. I hope for similar thing here we're not just using this to have annotations, we're also using it as a content discovery tool, seeing what content there is from people we follow.

I'd try to suggest sites should have something like pingbacks, to make it so the site can keep track of annotations. But that would let them filter anotations which I don't like, and more problematically, it's an opt in mechanism. Having centralized search systems seems obvious. Ideally maybe some kind of kademlia hash might offer a P2p alternative. It's quite possible maybe bittorrent pex's P2p layer could be used/abused for this.

Re: Google Sidewiki

#60

Post by raybb »

albertzeyer wrote: post #45

There are browser extensions like Reddit Check or What Hacker News Says which will show Reddit and/or HN comments on any website you visit. So it's very similar in functionality. Sometimes it can be useful. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/reddit-check/mllce... https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/what-hacker-news-s... There are more variants of these extensions.

Hope someone makes a Lemmy version soon!
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