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Hypothes.is: An Open Annotations Platform

web.hypothes.is

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Re: Hypothes.is: An Open Annotations Platform

#61

Post by md224 »

vannevar wrote: post #38

The idea of collaborative annotation has been around since the beginning of the web. I tried to launch an annotation startup myself back in 2000, and there were several funded competitors back then. It never catches on. It would be interesting to analyze why people just don't use these systems when given the opportunity. Is this a solution in search of a problem?

I have a pet theory that Twitter is the ultimate annotation platform that’s been right in front of us the whole time. The reason it doesn’t seem like one is because it blurs the line between “annotation” and “conversation”.

I think the dynamic is similar: while a normal annotation is a comment on a fragment of text, a Twitter reply is (or at least can be) a comment on a single portion of a longer thread.

Two notable differences:

- While a typical annotation platform takes a freely-written text and allows any segment to be annotated, Twitter forces the author of a thread to compose their text with the segment boundaries in mind.

- While a normal annotation system doesn’t allow you to annotate the annotations, any given “annotation” on Twitter may itself be a thread which allows for annotation. It’s recursive!

Maybe the above is a stretch, but personally I think it’s an interesting way to think about Twitter.

Re: Hypothes.is: An Open Annotations Platform

#64

Post by yumraj »

Just last year I was looking at annotations in general and potentially using Hypothesis as the initial MVP implementation to solve a problem in a very different, well different from research, market.

Unfortunately I got distracted, but I still believe in it and may come back to it again.

Re: Hypothes.is: An Open Annotations Platform

#65

Post by memexy »

jerf wrote: post #60
memexy wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Annotation systems don't have to be public. The default should be private with an option to make parts public as necessary. Comments in some sense are annotations that are anchored at the wrong place and with the wrong visibility (public instead of private). The main value of annotations is as a personal knowledge system anchored on top of public knowledge. As one's private knowledge grows it eventually reaches a poi…

The person I was responding to specifically mentioned "collaborative annotation" and startups. Non-collaborative annotation has different tradeoffs. It may be useful to you, but I can't imagine there's any money there for a startup. It avoids the anti-network effects that kill annotations, and it avoids publisher objections too, but it also doesn't have a very compelling value proposition for very many people. It's l…

Why is there no money in a personal annotation system? I'd think any large organization would be willing to pay a lot of money to use a tool that would make its members more productive and effective.

In fact, Coda and Notion.so are very successful products and they're basically personal/private annotation systems (modulo storing everything in the cloud). I can imagine extending Coda and Notion.so with programmatic capabilities and adding offline storage and turning them into pretty successful personal annotation systems with premium features for supporting organizational work and collaboration.

There is plenty of money in this market when viewed from the right angle.

Re: Hypothes.is: An Open Annotations Platform

#66

Post by webwanderings »

vannevar wrote: post #38

The idea of collaborative annotation has been around since the beginning of the web. I tried to launch an annotation startup myself back in 2000, and there were several funded competitors back then. It never catches on. It would be interesting to analyze why people just don't use these systems when given the opportunity. Is this a solution in search of a problem?

People's informational bits are not unified as html or pdf. They could be anywhere: html on web (more than one browser), html on mobile (which browser is it?), pdf here, pdf there; tons of apps icons, whatsapps, facebook, bookmarks galore, blah, blah. We are all over the place. Annotation on the other hand is a tool for organized individuals. Life is not necessarily organized for most people, hence, this never got picked up.

Annotation should have been part of the browser from day one. It should have evolved with it when things moved on to the mobile world. It never happened.

Re: Hypothes.is: An Open Annotations Platform

#68

Post by BiteCode_dev »

tedmiston wrote: post #56
BiteCode_dev wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rather, OP is probably already using one and don't see the point of migrating to yet another closed system.

Hypothesis has an open API - https://h.readthedocs.io/en/latest/api/

It's not the matter.

If you use a saas, unless it's open source and you can self host, you are at the mercy of it.

If the service is good enough and the team behind it seems in good faith, it can give you confidence for the switch.

But promising to adopt a standard then not doing it doesn't inspire confidence.

The system being closed source (no open API can change that), they need to build trust with some users. Particularly the tech saavy ones that have been burnt in the past and hold data that is precious to them.

Re: Hypothes.is: An Open Annotations Platform

#69

Post by the_duke »

Vinnl wrote: post #6
smarx007 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slightly on a tangent, but https://github.com/hypothesis/h/issues/777 could be a good target for https://solidproject.org/ to address. The Web Annotation Vocabulary is defined in RDF, so there should be zero overhead.

I'm not entirely up-to-date on the annotation spec, but if all that's needed is to host the annotations somewhere, then Solid should already support that. It's just not really clear to me how a user should find out that there are annotations about a page available somewhere. (I work with Solid.)

Do you have views on the state and direction of Solid?

I check up on it every few months, and it seems like nothing has really happened since the announcement years ago.

The spec is mostly a stub , with no activity on Github.

There still seems to be only the node-solid-server implementation, which also sees almost no work.

Inrupt seems to have tried linking with/appropriating the project for the company brand for a while, which also felt weird.

Re: Hypothes.is: An Open Annotations Platform

#70

Post by woah »

jerf wrote: post #48
vannevar wrote: post #38

The idea of collaborative annotation has been around since the beginning of the web. I tried to launch an annotation startup myself back in 2000, and there were several funded competitors back then. It never catches on. It would be interesting to analyze why people just don't use these systems when given the opportunity. Is this a solution in search of a problem?

I think generalized annotation has the following problem: Draw a graph of all web pages ordered by how many times they are visited. You get a power law distribution. On the left are things like CNN's front page, on the right things like a text file containing a cheesecake recipe someone posted in 1995 that is technically still online but nobody has visited in years. On the left side are pages that are visited too oft…

I agree. I used to work for Hypothesis a very long time ago and this is the conclusion I came to as well. Pivoting to serve the academic community annotating PDFs was a good idea (this happened after I had left).
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