Re: Control on the right to create annotation

Misha Glouberman writes:
 > I'm banking on a few different ways that the question of scale could be tackled:
 > 
 > 1) The idea of a universally commentable web is found compelling enough by
 > enough sysadmins (or enough of their users) that a highly distributed
 > Usenet-like model could be supported.

I might be suggesting something like this usenet idea (if I understand
you) in

  http://union.ncsa.uiuc.edu/~liberte/www/scalable-annotations.html 

Here is what it said:

"" To support notification, the server could maintain a mailing list per
"" document. For each change that requires notification, mail would be
"" sent to each member of the list. This is not too much of a burden if
"" the number of list members is not too large. At some point it becomes
"" cost effective to switch over to an NNTP-style flooding distribution
"" of the notifications, but see the discussion of the disadvantages of
"" this approach in the section above on Other Attempts at Scalable
"" Annotations.
"" 
"" A hybrid between mailing lists and NNTP is possible to get the best of
"" both worlds. One route to creating this hybrid is to make mailing
"" lists transparently and dynamically hierarchical with many sublists to
"" handle remote distribution. Another route is to modify NNTP servers to
"" dynamically subscribe and unsubscribe from newsgroups based on local
"" or downstream demand. Ideally we need to distribute the load onto only
"" those nodes in the web that forward the notifications only to
"" interested readers. Each node should have only a small number of
"" neighbors to keep its load relatively constant.

 > my paper, at http://www.muchmusic.com/muchmusic/cyberfax/annot.html

In this you say:

"" Issues of annotation are being discussed by the Annotation Working
"" Group of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).  The focus of the group
"" now seems to be firmly placed on providing distributed working groups
"" tools through which to use the Web for collaboration- a notion called
"" "annotation sets" would provide small-to-medium sized groups with
"" tools for sharing web annotations. The system being discussed doesn't
"" preclude the possibility of a universally commentable Web, but the
"" group generally views the possibility as a special case which should
"" not be given high priority. The closest thing to universal comments in
"" their published literature is found in the backlinks scenario, which
"" ends with the caveat that it should not be seen as a necessary goal of
"" the system's design.

This might be a misunderstanding.  I don't remember anyone saying that
a universally commentable web should not be given a high priority.  I
think it is probably the opposite.  On the other hand, your solutions
to universal commentability seem to tend toward gargantuan,
centralized services, and it is those we considered not a high
priority.  Distributing the annotation services has been our general
approach.

 > >And Daniel LaLiberte wrote:
 > >One might set up a
 > >parallel DNS tree for annotation services, but this potentially has
 > >the same problem since every server might have some legal power
 > >over the corresponding annotation server.
 > 
 > I don't think I understand what you're getting at here, and I'm really
 > interested in knowing. If you could actually get enough people to host
 > 3rd-party annotation servers, a parallel DNS tree of some sort seems like a
 > perfectly fine solution for allowing the browser to find the appropriate
 > annotation server for a given page.

I'm not clear on what the legal issues are, and they probably vary
from country to country.  If there were hundreds of such parallel DNS
trees, there might be no problem at all since there would be too many
to fight.  But if there were only a few, which is what seems required
to have just a few places to go to get public annotations, then these
might be targets for trademark infringment lawsuits.

 > Are you imagining that web servers would volunteer to run their own
 > annotation servers, and then try to control their content?

Yes, servers could volunteer to run annotation servers for annotations
of their own documents.  And they would likely want to control the
content, and in many cases the readers would be happy with that
arrangement.

 > Or are you suggesting that servers would have some inherent legal
 > claim on 3rd party annotation servers?

Trademark concerns the use of a name in any context where its meaning
is understood, or something like that.  So a parallel DNS tree
containing something like www.microsoft.com.comment.net and many other
.com sites might get people up in arms.

Distributing the 3rd party annotation servers in a fashion that
doesn't mirror the DNS tree would distribute the legal problems as
well, but it also makes it harder to find annotations.  In other words,
making it easy to find public annotations for any particular page may also
make it easy to attack them legally.

 > The question, then, is whether there's a way to force pages into being
 > annotatable, for those users who do want to see the comments.

Not if the page owners have anything to say about it.

dan

Received on Thursday, 22 August 1996 14:11:33 UTC