Re: Control on the right to create annotation

Roland-

Your main point, that annotation should be pursued gradually, lest
annotation frighten away prospective web publishers, is interesting.

I'd propose a sort of counterpoint argument, though: 

 Precisely because the web is an emerging new medium, it's still very
malleable. We don't know if plans we make now will still be possible to
implement in a couple of years time. It's easier to make changes to a small
system and watch it grow than to make changes to it once it's grown up.
Beyond the technological changes that we can't predict, there's also a set
of  attitudes that will change- right now, a lot of the rhetoric around the
net centers around buzzwords like "democracy", "openness" and
"interactivity". Similar rhetoric was invoked when radio, television, and
cable were first developed, and slowly faded away. You could conclude that
the time to introduce new democratizing elements to the medium is during its
infancy, while the technology is still in its formative years and popular
thinking about it is still based on optimistic and progressive assumptions.

This is all far from air-tight of course. I just wanted, mostly in the
spirit of play, to point out that there is an argument for the opposite
conclusion...

A bit more seriously, I'm wary of making it a conscious goal to keep the web
friendly and inviting for people who want to restrict what gets said about
them or what they publish.

Roland Alton-Scheid wrote:

> I think we have to respect, that some information does not want to be
>commented.

I have no doubt that some information providers won't want their information
commented on. I also expect that that is the information that would most
want to be commented upon.

I guess I'm still curious- Are there examples of web content where you think
a "no comments" option would be desirable?

>
>Certainly, commenting web pages would bring the Internet back to its roots:
>an interactive many-to-many media. But the penetrating commenting facility
>has to be introduced softly. I believe in self regulating mechanisms: If
>web commenting is going to be widely accepted, one-way-minded information
>providers might get convinced, if they see, how it works and that their
>customers may demand, to give and see feedback. Otherwise executives might
>overreact, if someone blackens a companies reputation.
>
>In Web4Groups we suggest to handle that with a <nodiscussion> tag, that can
>be used by scary webmasters. 

I assume this is a typo, but I think it's a salient one: I imagine a lot of
scary webmasters using <nodiscussion>.


>If a user is going through the w4g proxy,
>buttons are added: "Start discussion", "Join discussion" or "Sorry,
>provider of this page does not allow public feedback". In the latter case,
>people might send an e-mail to the webmaster. Or we might offer a link to a
>discussion, that has a similar content like the ongoing one here, thus
>bringing the issue on a meta-level.

Do you think web maintainers who wanted to keep discussion off their pages
would be happy about links to discussion on similar topics? What would keep
the "similar" discussions becoming focused disussion about the page with the
<nodiscussion> tag, thereby defeating the tag's purpose?

Anyhow, all this talk about the <nodiscussion> tag is probably just so much
hairsplitting (yes- I remember. I started it...). It'll likely always be
possible for publishers to dodge comments (by changing addresses, or, as you
suggest, by staying off the web altogether). I'm more concerned about the
ideas behind the inclusion of the <nodiscussion> tag than about the tag
itself...


        - Misha

Received on Tuesday, 27 August 1996 16:20:41 UTC