RE: email annotation

Well, for most mail (but not Yahoo I suspect) the msgid is readily available
and can be used in existing systems. This provides interoperability with
other annotation tools - there is nothing more frustrating than having two
different and incompatible annotation systems.

A hash over the page has some advantages - you know if something has changed.
On the other hand that makes it difficult to maintain annotations when a page
changes - although this happens less often with mail messages (very few
people edit their archived email) it is important for a system that works for
both web pages and email in the same way.

I would need to see some real benefit over existing free systems before I
would pay for such a tool (well, before I would pay more than shareware
prices anyway). I am not sure what I would like to see on top of it - the
sort of things that I would like on top of web annotations - threading,
authentication, a powerful access control system so I could let certain
people annotate or give access to certain messages or annotations, ...

cheers

Chaals

On Fri, 30 Aug 2002, Laurent Denoue wrote:

>Salut Charles,
>
>It's a good idea to use archives since we can leverage existing Web annotation systems.
>In fact, this would also work for Web-based email clients like Yahoo!Mail.
>
>I developped a prototype in the spirit of Yawas: a very light tool to highlight
>outlook emails in your inbox. Sorry: only Outlook, only Windows :( but it's good to test ideas out.
>
>It does not modify the original messages of course: it simply dynamically highlights them when
>the user previews them in outlook.
>
>To solve the problem of keys for documents, I currently use a signature of each email.
>It is computed by simply summing all characters in the email. It has been working very well for the last 2 months on my emails.
>
>Using a signature of the CONTENT itself is very robust: if you move your email to a different folder, the program is still able to dynamically remap the annotations.
>
>Quick poll 1: Would anybody pay for such a tool?
>Quick poll 2: What services would you like plugged on top of it?
>
>Laurent.
>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Charles McCathieNevile [mailto:charles@w3.org]
>> Sent: Friday, August 30, 2002 5:43 AM
>> To: Laurent Denoue
>> Cc: www-annotation@w3.org
>> Subject: Re: email annotation
>>
>>
>> Well, at W3C we archive our email lists on the Web. This means you can
>> annotate those. You could also annotate by the message id
>> that each email
>> has.
>>
>> Although we can use that as a key into our archive, as far as I know
>> there is no reliable way of finding an email mesage that was
>> sent based on
>> its message-id (happily enough, since most email is
>> personal). But I don't
>> think that's really a problem for most use cases - if you
>> take an annotea
>> approach then anyone who has the email can find the id in the
>> header and
>> query for an annotation - usually that means the sender and
>> recipient(s).
>>
>> cheers
>>
>> Chaals
>>
>> On Wed, 28 Aug 2002, Laurent Denoue wrote:
>>
>> >Hello,
>> >
>> >Does anybody know of a program to annotate emails?
>> >Web annotations systems are popular, but emails are also a
>> very big source of online reading so it would make sense to
>> have such a tool.
>> >
>> >Laurent.
>> >
>> >
>>
>> --
>> Charles McCathieNevile  http://www.w3.org/People/Charles
>> tel: +61 409 134 136
>> SWAD-E http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe ------------ WAI
>http://www.w3.org/WAI
> 21 Mitchell street, FOOTSCRAY Vic 3011, Australia  fax(fr): +33 4 92 38 78 22
> W3C, 2004 Route des Lucioles, 06902 Sophia Antipolis Cedex, France
>

-- 
Charles McCathieNevile  http://www.w3.org/People/Charles  tel: +61 409 134 136
SWAD-E http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe ------------ WAI http://www.w3.org/WAI
 21 Mitchell street, FOOTSCRAY Vic 3011, Australia  fax(fr): +33 4 92 38 78 22
 W3C, 2004 Route des Lucioles, 06902 Sophia Antipolis Cedex, France

Received on Monday, 2 September 2002 10:37:29 UTC