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Google SideWiki Brings Comments To Everyone
Rophuine writes "Google has launched a product called SideWiki. It takes the form of a plug-in to Firefox and Internet Explorer which allows users to mark up the web by adding comments which can be seen by anyone else running SideWiki."
Google's version joins a long line of attempts to impose a layer of comments on the Web, including
Microsoft's Smart Tags and Third Voice.
itll be 99% 0f the comments especially on slashdot
To clarify, SideWiki requires the Google Toolbar, which itself requires IE6 (or later) or Firefox 2 (or later).
The headline on Google's Get Google Sidewiki page reads, "Contribute helpful information to any web page." Yet this is being released to the general public, which is the same group that is responsible for most of the crap already on the internet. SideWiki should probably be renamed to Creeping Crud (hello, Wizardry fans) to more accurately describe the end result. But hey, you have to run SideWiki in order to see other SideWiki users' crud, so I guess it's a closed universe and therefore okay.
Despite the name, Sidewiki is not a wiki such that people can edit, prune, and synthesize information, nor is it moderated in any way. It's just a comment system, with no way to amplify the signal vs the noise. It's also unclear how people are supposed to use it- e.g., what to post (which is a significant failing imo). Interesting as an approach to layer user comments onto webpages, but not useful yet. Arstechnica pretty much nailed it with the following:
This new offering from Google is intriguing in some ways and it shows that the company is thinking creatively about how to build dialog and additional value around existing content. The scope and utility of the service seems a bit narrow. The random nature of the existing annotations suggest that the quality and depth of the user-contributed content will be roughly equivalent with the comments that people post about pages at aggregation sites like Digg and Reddit.
What makes Wikipedia content useful is the ability of editors to delete the crap and restructure the existing material to provide something of value. Without the ability to do that with Sidewiki, it's really little more than a glorified comment system and probably should have been built as such. As it stands, I think that most users will just be confused about what kind annotations they should post.
A whole new way to astroturf.
http://twitter.com/OLDTELEGRAM
It takes the form of a plug-in to Firefox and Internet Explorer
What, Google aren't even releasing plug-ins for their own browser first? What kind of endorsement is that?
Before this can be truly successful, there needs to be a feature which blocks all comments which can be traced back to active members of 4chan or Youtube.
Experience has provided me with some skepticism regarding the intelligence of crowds. This Sidewiki would be like having a running commentary on the web, written by the same type of people who write Youtube comments and -1 rated comments on Slashdot.
Thanks, but no thanks. Hope that one dies in beta, unless they figure out how to filter out the crap, and bring the valuable contributions to the top. They could start by testing their filters on Youtube.
Slashdot - the place where you can look like a genius by restating the obvious
Cluttered browser window + Wiki nonsense != desirable plug-in
0 = 1 + e^(Alt something)
There has been hundreds of such plugins for both IE and FF for ever. The problem with them is that they're not build in to the browser and no one uses them. Its quite possible it would be really small amount of users using it even if it was build-in, since its not really why the users are there on the site and it just forgots. It would probably be full of "nice site", "hi everybody!" and "first!1!" comments too.
Hard to see how this would be useful without moderation. Hard to see how moderation could be implemented in a practical way.
When I first read about this (after reading this summary) it seemed somewhat intriguing. Who knows, perhaps it could allow some useful knowledge to be slapped on some of the webpages and articles on the internet that are scant on details or technical info. However, after looking at the download page of this little plugin, it appears that you can sync this service with " Blogger, Facebook, Twitter and Google profiles" which means, to me at least, that if I am reading an article regarding a new possible HIV vaccine, rather than have helpful comments with related studies and scientific journal entries attached to it, the article will instead hemorrhage a barrage of comments that have to do with people fearing getting AIDS from public restroom toilet seats and the "ZOMG 70ta11y @w3some HAWT girl the b@ng3d at a 9427y last night"....who had AIDS....
Sad and lame.
Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
Google Search already has the SearchWiki that doesn't seem overly popular because no one remembers it exists when writing about the "new" feature. Wasn't it already supposed to "bring comments to everyone"? I think people are just not interested in commenting websites, or rather, the ones posting comments won't be doctors and academics as shown in their example. Google lives in an ideal world where comments are relevant.
I don't think any business wants comments from morons presented alongside official content. If google want to provide a service allowing people to comment on one of my personal sites, they can damn well provide a web reachable URL. There's no way I'm installing a plugin to keep track of what's going on outside my moderated commenting system.
I am a little disturbed that I cannot find reference to any way that the site owner can "opt out" of having a sidewiki hooked to their pages. At least with Microsoft SmartTags, there was a way to disable them with a meta tag in the html header, and unlike Microsoft, Google has enough geek fanboys who think Google shits gold out there to make this feature take off.
I used to have comments enabled on my Flickr photos, but jokers kept on leaving suggestive remarks about my wife (she's pretty hot, IMHO). So, I turned it off. When talking about this with a colleague yesterday, we came up with the "ugly kid" scenario:
Imagine you have a family site with pictures of your kids on it and some jerk writes, "man, you have ugly kids" on the sidewiki. What do you do? You can't remove it. Will it be filtered out automatically by Google with their so-called "quality algorithm"? Just because there will be no anonymous posts, don't think that people won't do things like this.
Seriously, has anyone seen anything about a way to turn this off for your site? I'm not against free speech and all that, just don't add it to *my* content without my permission. Whether sidewiki is considered part of the page content is academic: the visitor will see it attached to your page.
There was a system out about 6 or so years ago that would allow anyone to post a virtual "sticky" note on a web page and anyone else who had the program could read it. Same concept as what Google is trying.
All I can remember is the amount of spam and junk that was written up, mostly on webpages that people didn't like or who were rivals. A lot of companies got VERY upset about the system, and the company what created the software pulled it.
Bad idea. Put this one back in the box and try something else Google. Bad idea.
Yahoo already has Searchpad. Honestly, Yahoo's search results interface is chock full of features that people aren't noticing until someone like Google copies it.
Kriston
Does this give Google a real-time ping with the URL for each and every page I visit?
the enemies of trolls are legion, and trolls are under siege. however, recent technological research has uncovered an entirely new parallel dimension of troll content overlaying the entire web, without any of the typical anti-troll technology in place
a fertile, virgin land, a new world, ready for colonization and plenty of glorious trolling like "no, u stfu!" and "This web page sounds like typical Obama style fascist socialism"
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
a) On a 404 page - "This page has been moved to ____" b) On paid content websites - "You can download it at [thepiratebay link]" c) Talk to the author (oh god, I'd rage at this) - "Hey, it didn't work in my IE6!" or "You used 'their' incorrectly" I can't think of any other case that has not been covered by conventional moderating system.
Yes, it's a great idea, the only problem is making it actually work. Some folks have been trying for almost fifty years.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Add a rating system, not unlike Amazon has for it's products. Basically, viewers can rate the comments up or down; significantly negative comments will eventually be eaten by the system. Significantly good comments will be presented in order of appearance. Additionally, it would be good to have a section presenting the 3 comments with the fewest votes, so the viewer would be likely to add his own vote to those.
Extrinsic annotations. It is something that has certainly been talked about for years, though has never really gained much traction. It is also implicit (in part) in some standards like RDF. It comes down to this: How to you say something about content where you do not control the content, and still have your comments seen? Today, if the White House puts out a press release, you can certainly comment it on your blog, on Twitter, in comments to a news article, etc., but you have zero power to make your comments appear in the context of the original press release. The content author is king, and those with high Google PageRank have disproportionate (though not undue) exposure and influence. Sure, we have blogs, which encourage reader commentary, but this is exclusively at the sufferance of the page owner.
But now, with extrinsic annotations, anyone can comment on anyone's web page and have it appear in the context of that web page. I can comment on the White House press release, and so can everyone nut in the world. This is totally subversive and can easily be used for good or evil, but since this is the web it will likely be used for spam and porn more than anything else.
The challenge is how do you prevent this approach from collapsing under the oppressive weight of the vast banality of mass humanity? The web had the same problem, which PageRank solved (in part). We may need something analogous to tame the new "meta web".
I had an idea once. It was a mat. With different conclusions written on it. That you could jump to.
1. Your gay!
2. This is gay
3. NOOB ASS
4. your a noob ass
5. your a fag
6. this is for fags!!
7. BuY v1agr4 n0w
8. 0b4ma will kill us all!!
oogly boogly!
Everyone worthwhile, then.
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
Actually XMosaic did contain annotation functionality. You could add personal annotations to a web page (which could be seen only by yourself), and you could also add public annotations (but I think the web site would have had to cooperate).
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
This would make the World of Warcraft forums even more illegible.
No portion of this post may be rebroadcast without the express, written consent of Major League Baseball.
If you own a Web site, then you are forced to install this.
Otherwise how could you know what insightful comments have been posted against your web pages.
And then, of course, you will be tempted to comment on other pages.
Exponential growth!
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I am a programmer. I am paid to produce syntax not grammar. Deal with it.
A few years ago I hired a landscaper who wouldn't return my calls or fix his shoddy work after screwing the job badly. If I wanted to warn others about this, I could use Sidewiki to leave a note about my experience. I'm sure he would disable it if he could, but the fact that he can't is the beauty of such a system. I'm not changing his content or using his server--I'm using a Google service.
This will be awesome.
The first iteration will have everybody posing unmoderated, and anon. The 4chan guys will quickly demonstrate to Google the foolish error of it's ways.
The second iteration will allow moderation via some sort of community ranking or tagging. This will seem awesome until the spammers write bots to boost their spam postings to the top of the moderation heap. Google will be shamed again.
The third iteration will allow people to create accounts, and track their karma. Users will be able to filter out comments below a certain level, and moderate statements they disagree with as 'trolls'.
It then will be the perfect system.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Even omitting the bullshit comments, these things can go two ways.
1) it'll remain unpopular, making sure that there are too few comments to ever make it useful.
2) it'll become popular, making sure there are too many comments to be usable.
Either way I'm taking the shortcut by just not bothering with it.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
What I mean by that last point is that you'd have the ability to 'mod up' posters rather than comments, and moreover your moderations would only apply to you. No one else would see your mods, nor would you see anyone else's, except that you would have the option to make your mods recursive: if you moderate Bob at +1, then maybe you would see Bob's +1-modded posters at +0.5, and those posters' +1-modded posters at +0.25, and so on.
Of course, the moderation and PGP signatures would be completely optional, and would be applied in addition to regular spam filtering like that of existing Usenet and email clients.
Back in 1996 or so I had a Netscape 4 plugin that did this.
Someone tries to do it again every few years.
*sigh*
People need to study their history.
Google may succeed in this because of the wide distribution of their toolbar, but that is the only difference in this effort.
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
I wonder if Google will put advertising banners at the top of the sidewiki bar, as another way to make themselves money off other people's content?
Snide wiki?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
It's called a wiki, but from what I've seen I don't see any wiki functionality at all. It looks a lot more like a blog, or rather the comment section of a blog to me.
Why do the call it wiki when I can leave a comment, but not participate in a kind of "review of this page" site? Basically, when it is not a wiki?
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org