Re: Backlash vs. Third-Party Annotations from MS Smart Tags

On Fri, 15 Jun 2001, Kynn Bartlett wrote:

> A lot of people -- primarily web designers or web content authors --
> seem to be incensed over the idea that a third party could provide
> information "on a page" (as displayed by a user agent) which was not
> placed there by the original author.  To those people, Annotea is just
> as evil and wrong as Smart Tags.

I've been following some discussions about Smart Tags and I see two
general types of objections:

Some people think that any kind of "mediation" of their content is wrong
and thus oppose all annotation (and many other aspects of the Semantic
Web). (BTW, I don't think it's accurate to say that annotation can't be
prevented. Annotation software developers can only fight off so many
lawsuits before they go bankrupt.)

Some people dislike the fact that the default Smart Tags database was
pointing only to Microsoft sites, but they don't object to annotation as
long as it isn't being used to prop up a monopoly.

Wesley Felter - wesley@felter.org - http://felter.org/wesley/

Received on Sunday, 17 June 2001 14:24:23 UTC