Re: barriers to deployment of web annotation?

dlaliberte@gte.com wrote:
[...]
> Furthermore, even if there were third party annotation
> services, the big info providers whose pages would be annotated without
> their control would not necessarily like this situation, and they are
> the ones who ultimate pay a large portion of the bills (well consumers
> really do, but they don't have much control).

So what?  It's clear for me that the Web page maintainer do not really
want third party annotations, such as advertisments from the direct
competitors.  
However, if you can develop a third party annotation system that do not
rely on the cooperation of existing Web servers, the Web page mainteners
have no chance to control your annotations.
Do you really think that ISPs will switch your annotations service off,
just because Web page mainteners do not like your service?  At least, I
would suggest that other ISPs will fast step in and offer such a service
to you as a competitive advantage...  If consumers want it, they'll get
it.

Still all the other challenges (especially uninteresting and misleading
annotations) still exist.  This can be overcome by filtering operations
(cooperative filtering and defined interest groups come into mind).

I still think that scalability is the main reason that no such system
exist.  Probably you'll need a combination of Web caches (or other
proxies) and multicast (or NNTP) for synchronization and updating
annotations.

Cheers, 
- Jakob
-- 
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Received on Wednesday, 9 December 1998 07:21:03 UTC