So Many Schemes

After writing about online annotation, I received an invite to diigo, a new social web page annotation service. Diigo seems like a pretty cool idea, although the beta, at least, is hampered by some of the same fundamental issues encountered by all online annotation systems that I’ve seen. Diigo allows you to bookmark pages, highlight and annotate portions of pages, and share these content items with your friends, or the whole world, via feeds and tags. Diigo works via a Firefox, Flock (not surprising, as it comes from the same base as Firefox), or IE plugin. Unfortunately, the plugin is not available for Safari yet. With the plugin installed, you can highlight portions of a page’s text and leave annotations. Additionally, you can choose to view comments and annotations left by your friends, or the Internet as a whole.

The hard thing about web page annotation is figuring out how to lock a highlight or annotation to a specific place on a web page. Especially with dynamically generated pages, the content can change often, so how do you know where to put the annotation? I was excited to see how diigo handled this issue, and they seem to have taken the textual route, analyzing the page’s source via JavaScript and looking for text that matches what was originally annotated. This works when the annotated text is unique, but fails if you happen to annotate text the recurs on the page. However, this still works reasonably well. (If you’re interested, you can grab their plugin and unzip the .jar file to see how some of this stuff works. The interesting text selection code is in the core.js file.) I don’t know how to get around the annotation problem, but will keep an eye on diigo as they continue to refine their beta. Perhaps they will think of something that I haven’t.

Solution Watch and TechCrunch already wrote about Diigo.

I have been thinking about web annotation. I envision a social service that allows you to annotate any webpage, share your annotations with a group of friends, and use this both as a form of artistic expression (web graffiti) and as another level of online knowledge transfer. These annotations could be text based or graphical. Ideally, I’d like both, where you could simply draw on the page, or type in text, and have it stick with a little mouse-over date/time stamp. I know the technical challenge of overlaying data on dynamic content is imposing, however.

Now, a site called Mystickies [via Goggle Blogoscoped] is trying this with floating text boxes — sticky notes. Their service isn’t collaborative or sharable yet, which is a shame, but it’s a start.

There are some other attempts at online annotation, such as the Annotation Engine. However, the Annotation Engine doesn’t have social controls or groups, so the quantity of annotation — spam, graffiti, whatever — grows out of control. It’s also old and kind of broken. I think a good system would use a karma and interest threshold approach, similar to slashdot, to decide what to show you.

Another fun project is wikalong, which I am a big fan of. It’s not on-page annotation, it is a sidebar wiki for every page on the internet. They simplified the annotation problem into something manageable, and then pulled it off.