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Damn, after looking it appears they have let the domain expire. It was a great idea, don't know what happened to it, perhaps there's an explanation at the Foresight site.

Maybe you're thinking of CritLink/CritSuite?

I can't get to the site at the moment, but you could try an old cache at archive.org.

They could put a link for comments about search results, and link discussion sites (slashdot and similars, weblogs, usenet, etc) that show links to this sites as possible comments.

The Foresight Institute sponsored something several years ago to annotate the web, called Crit , written by Ka-Ping Yee.

Unfortunately the site seems to be down right now, but it was a great way of adding notes to web sites. There was no moderation or "note ranking" so it was fairly primitive but a great start.

There's a short paper explaining this system at http://zesty.ca/crit/yee-crit-cscw2002-demo.pdf.

There's a short paper explaining this system at http://zesty.ca/crit/yee-crit-cscw2002-demo.pdf.

Remember that once you've made a public statement in the real world, it's out there and there's nothing anyone can really do about it. You can issue(*) a later correction, retraction, clarification, or whatever, but the original doesn't go away, despite what politicians and other public figures might wish. Now that we all have access to the world's screens, we need to be careful what we say if we care about later consequences.

(*) There are other aspects of the Web that make this difficult. See the "Related Projects..." section at crit.org for more.

(apologies if I'm fuzzy on any details)

And then I remembered something I read about years ago: http://www.crit.org . This site allows you to add annotations to other web pages.

So to make sure everything was still working, I attached your above comments to the second link you provided. (I tried the first as well, but since it's a direct link to a Word doc, it wouldn't do it.)

The Crit tools are really cool; it's like adding Slashdot-style commenting to every site! There's no moderation, AFAIK, though.

Third voice no longer exists. I have not been able to find any hard data on what the conclusions of the lawsuits filed against thirdvoice were. Either way, it is not important; Wired says that 3rdvoice went down for the sole reason that the web advertising market is shit, and legal harrassment was not involved. Sad; it was a nifty idea. Maybe someday we will see a GPLed equivilent?

Crit has been around for a long time and is still going.

[TMB]

Speaking as someone who runs a non-profit (foresight.org, nanodot.org), what most non-profits need desperately is consistently-available trouble-shooting and systems administration (i.e. boring stuff), to keep their machines working. Only after that is in place can they take on more-ambitious projects, and those are sometimes given as a treat to the person who does the boring stuff. Only a few nonprofits (like us) try to do fun, ambitious new software (crit.org, etc).

These are low-end systems, but they are in fairly wide use.

A related subject is collaborative annotation. this paper has a good review of tools, and CritLink is interesting.

I really want to work on this as part of an Open Source developer groupware app I'm working on, but the tuit supply is remarkably scarce at the moment...

- Barrie

Guess what? We already have them for the Web.

See http://crit.org/ for bidirectional, typed, fine-grained links into any Web document. Annotate any existing document publicly with a link to a new document, enabling you to comment, rate, and connect together existing information in new ways.

It's one small part of the dream of what the Web should be.

Most of the above arguments are well and good. Yes, *we* know about FUD, but discussing all this in our own safe little cubby-hole that is /. isn't getting the message out.

Therefore, comment on the page using this URL: http ://crit.org/http://www.microsoft.com/ntserver/nts/ news/msnw/LinuxMyths.asp and most importantly, tell people about it!

This page is obviously a vehicle to deploy some FUD. [...] That is, until the public finds out exactly how full of it they are :)

"Ratings" as a numeric value is a bit shallow --
CritLink provides free (free source too!), universal web page annotation without client-side software. The annotations appear inline with the webpage when viewed through CritLink, and can be stored on your own webpage rather than on Crit's servers.

What you're talking about is called a mediator .

I've been doing this for years. In 1995 i came out with Shodouka, which is a mediator that replaces JIS codes with GIF images so anybody can see Japanese text even if they don't have fonts installed. In 1996 i created MINSE, a semantic expression language with a mediator that lets anybody see math expressions directly embedded in web pages. MINSE was special because, like this so-called "transcoder", it would translate the equation into an appropriate form for the browser: use Netscape, and you get nice antialiased GIF images of the equations; use Lynx, and you get a good attempt at ASCII art. It is still the only way to easily put math on the Web that anyone can view.

In 1997 i did Crit, which enabled anybody to make public annotations on any Web page for the first time. You might want to check that out too (source code is available). It makes all links bidirectional and allows you to make links from your document to a specific phrase in the target document. As a side benefit it shows you some useful metadata about the document which browsers often hide. Again, since it's a mediator, anyone can view or create annotations using any browser -- people running Lynx can attach annotations to anything too.

The whole idea of "Web middleware" has been around for a long time. I'm pretty sure i was first, but many others have done similar things since then (e.g. Anonymizer, babelfish, and so on). Rohit Khare wrote a nice paper in 1998 summarizing the idea and various applications.

-- ?!ng

crit.org has had universal web annotation for a while now... but that didn't stop Third Voice from claiming they were the first earlier this year. The first proprietary one, perhaps.

[TMB]

I'd like to second that recommendation. Marc based his book on a lot of the ideas that have swirled around this group (hypertext, idea futures, real computer security, smart contracting, etc.).

By the way, bidirectional linking is not new to the Web. It was new in 1997, when it was introduced by CritLink. I encourage you to check that out, too. It lets anybody annotate any public web page using any browser -- no software required.

-- ?!ng

A quite different system of comment upon non-news on the Web is CritLink. It allows you to post and read comments on webpages, from links inline with the webpage being critiqued. It also tracks backlinks. Very nice, makes the Web more useful.

Allen

This proposal is reminiscent of Drexler's suggestions for effective use of hypertext as outlined (for instance) in Engines of Creation (which is web-available, but I'm too lazy to find it right now). In fact, when he was describing hypertext in that context (before it was layered on top of the internet to create the Web as it exists today - which actually only implements about a third of the features of his proposed system) his discussion seemed to think of it primarily as a means of publishing scholarly information, reviewing it, and correcting for the lag-times and lack of back-links in conventional print media.

This proposal doesn't seem to implement backlinks, but the availability of updating to correct bad information makes up for some of that.

Some benefit might be had by looking at integrating some of the features found in the CritSuite (authored by Ka-Ping Yee and to be found at crit.org), which uses a proxy-server method to implement many of the missing features of true hypertext as a layer on top of existing WWW content.

A good versioning system with history information available (analogous to CVS) is also desirable - this is somewhat reminiscent of Daniel Dennett's "Multiple Drafts Model" (which he used as a metaphor/model to describe how the mind handles memory, but which could equally well be taken at face value as a method for handling bona-fide document drafts in an electronic environment), but with better memory.

I'm kind of skeptical here: a poorly implemented system is in some ways worse than no system at all, because it can lead to complacency. As long as careful consideration is given to which features are desirable, this could be a Very Good Thing.

One characteristic to watch for is how much centralized control is given to "editors" over content and filtering. Automated filtering methods, trust networks, reputational ranking, etc. have been fairly well-developed ideas for years. It would be an unfortunate oversight to fall back on print-age social technologies when something better is available.