Re: barriers to deployment of web annotation?

Jakob Hummes writes:
 > 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.

Yes, I did mention that an ISP-sponsored annotation service might be
viable.  But the risk of litigation might scare off such ventures.
Moreover, how much do the consumers really want annotations?  At what
additional cost?

Somethings seem like they should be interesting, but they aren't, like
annotations.  Other things seem like they would not be interesting, but
they are, like chat.  Apparently, we are the odd ones.

 > 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).

Automatic filtering will continue to be an interesting technological
challenge for a long time since it is essentially an artificial
intelligence problem.

Enabling *people* to do the filtering is a far easier technological
problem, but it is also a social problem: why would they bother?
Certainly some people will do reviews for you, but they have to be
getting something for it, or it has to be extremely easy.  Furthermore,
whose filtering are you going to trust?  There are quite a few pieces
missing from the web-of-trust puzzle, but I think it will eventually
happen.

--
Daniel LaLiberte
 dlaliberte@gte.com  (was: liberte@ncsa.uiuc.edu)
 liberte@hypernews.org

Received on Wednesday, 9 December 1998 11:26:46 UTC