Rophuine writes "Google has launched a product called SideWiki. It takes the form of a plug-in to Firefox and Internet Explorer which allows users to mark up the web by adding comments which can be seen by anyone else running SideWiki."
Google's version joins a long line of attempts to impose a layer of comments on the Web, including
Microsoft's Smart Tags and Third Voice.
To clarify, SideWiki requires the Google Toolbar, which itself requires IE6 (or later) or Firefox 2 (or later).
The headline on Google's Get Google Sidewiki [google.com] page reads, "Contribute helpful information to any web page." Yet this is being released to the general public, which is the same group that is responsible for most of the crap already on the internet. SideWiki should probably be renamed to Creeping Crud (hello, Wizardry fans) to more accurately describe the end result. But hey, you have to run SideWiki in order to see other SideWiki users' crud, so I guess it's a closed universe and therefore okay.
Despite the name, Sidewiki is not a wiki such that people can edit, prune, and synthesize information, nor is it moderated in any way. It's just a comment system, with no way to amplify the signal vs the noise. It's also unclear how people are supposed to use it- e.g., what to post (which is a significant failing imo). Interesting as an approach to layer user comments onto webpages, but not useful yet. Arstechnica pretty much nailed it with the following:
This new offering from Google is intriguing in some ways and it shows that the company is thinking creatively about how to build dialog and additional value around existing content. The scope and utility of the service seems a bit narrow. The random nature of the existing annotations suggest that the quality and depth of the user-contributed content will be roughly equivalent with the comments that people post about pages at aggregation sites like Digg and Reddit. What makes Wikipedia content useful is the ability of editors to delete the crap and restructure the existing material to provide something of value. Without the ability to do that with Sidewiki, it's really little more than a glorified comment system and probably should have been built as such. As it stands, I think that most users will just be confused about what kind annotations they should post.
"astroturf" means fake testimonials, not ads, which are generally called "spam".
So saying "you can get this cheaper elsewhere" is not "astroturfing". A fake post from a "customer" saying "I bought this and it is wonderful" or "it really sucks" would be astroturfing.
Of course this will collect plenty of both spam and astroturf.
Chrome will support it built in to the new version.
Hmm, wrong:
Peter Kasting says
From the article: "It will also eventually be integrated into Google's Chrome Web browser."
I am a Chromium developer, and as far as I know, this is untrue; I believe the hope is to make this a Chrome extension, not something that's part of the base product.
Before this can be truly successful, there needs to be a feature which blocks all comments which can be traced back to active members of 4chan or Youtube.
Experience has provided me with some skepticism regarding the intelligence of crowds. This Sidewiki would be like having a running commentary on the web, written by the same type of people who write Youtube comments and -1 rated comments on Slashdot.
Thanks, but no thanks. Hope that one dies in beta, unless they figure out how to filter out the crap, and bring the valuable contributions to the top. They could start by testing their filters on Youtube.
The only way this could work is if site owners could somehow manage the content, perhaps by authorizing some users to leave comments. Or perhaps they'll work it like Adwords, where the highest-paying contributor is listed first -- and maybe the site is paying for that. Or there would be some kind of vetting process for contributors.
Add a rating system, not unlike Amazon has for it's products. Basically, viewers can rate the comments up or down; significantly negative comments will eventually be eaten by the system. Significantly good comments will be presented in order of appearance. Additionally, it would be good to have a section presenting the 3 comments with the fewest votes, so the viewer would be likely to add his own vote to those.
When I first read about this (after reading this summary) it seemed somewhat intriguing. Who knows, perhaps it could allow some useful knowledge to be slapped on some of the webpages and articles on the internet that are scant on details or technical info. However, after looking at the download page of this little plugin, it appears that you can sync this service with " Blogger, Facebook, Twitter and Google profiles" which means, to me at least, that if I am reading an article regarding a new possible HIV vaccine, rather than have helpful comments with related studies and scientific journal entries attached to it, the article will instead hemorrhage a barrage of comments that have to do with people fearing getting AIDS from public restroom toilet seats and the "ZOMG 70ta11y @w3some HAWT girl the b@ng3d at a 9427y last night"....who had AIDS....
Google Search already has the SearchWiki [slashdot.org] that doesn't seem overly popular because no one remembers it exists when writing about the "new" feature. Wasn't it already supposed to "bring comments to everyone"? I think people are just not interested in commenting websites, or rather, the ones posting comments won't be doctors and academics as shown in their example. Google lives in an ideal world where comments are relevant.
by Anonymous Coward
on Thursday September 24, @12:44PM (#29531023)
I don't think any business wants comments from morons presented alongside official content. If google want to provide a service allowing people to comment on one of my personal sites, they can damn well provide a web reachable URL. There's no way I'm installing a plugin to keep track of what's going on outside my moderated commenting system.
You can't. It's like having an iphone app that gives you my opinions of every restaurant you go to - you have no moral, physical or legal right to prevent it from happening.
I am a little disturbed that I cannot find reference to any way that the site owner can "opt out" of having a sidewiki hooked to their pages. At least with Microsoft SmartTags, there was a way to disable them with a meta tag in the html header, and unlike Microsoft, Google has enough geek fanboys who think Google shits gold out there to make this feature take off.
I used to have comments enabled on my Flickr photos, but jokers kept on leaving suggestive remarks about my wife (she's pretty hot, IMHO). So, I turned it off. When talking about this with a colleague yesterday, we came up with the "ugly kid" scenario:
Imagine you have a family site with pictures of your kids on it and some jerk writes, "man, you have ugly kids" on the sidewiki. What do you do? You can't remove it. Will it be filtered out automatically by Google with their so-called "quality algorithm"? Just because there will be no anonymous posts, don't think that people won't do things like this.
Seriously, has anyone seen anything about a way to turn this off for your site? I'm not against free speech and all that, just don't add it to *my* content without my permission. Whether sidewiki is considered part of the page content is academic: the visitor will see it attached to your page.
Oh boo hoo! And what if users TALK about your site using their vocal cords?? Site owners must have some technology for disabling users' vocal chords while accessing their sites.
There was a system out about 6 or so years ago that would allow anyone to post a virtual "sticky" note on a web page and anyone else who had the program could read it. Same concept as what Google is trying.
All I can remember is the amount of spam and junk that was written up, mostly on webpages that people didn't like or who were rivals. A lot of companies got VERY upset about the system, and the company what created the software pulled it.
Bad idea. Put this one back in the box and try something else Google. Bad idea.
Yahoo already has Searchpad. Honestly, Yahoo's search results interface is chock full of features that people aren't noticing until someone like Google copies it.
the enemies of trolls are legion, and trolls are under siege. however, recent technological research has uncovered an entirely new parallel dimension of troll content overlaying the entire web, without any of the typical anti-troll technology in place
a fertile, virgin land, a new world, ready for colonization and plenty of glorious trolling like "no, u stfu!" and "This web page sounds like typical Obama style fascist socialism"
Extrinsic annotations. It is something that has certainly been talked about for years, though has never really gained much traction. It is also implicit (in part) in some standards like RDF. It comes down to this: How to you say something about content where you do not control the content, and still have your comments seen? Today, if the White House puts out a press release, you can certainly comment it on your blog, on Twitter, in comments to a news article, etc., but you have zero power to make your comments appear in the context of the original press release. The content author is king, and those with high Google PageRank have disproportionate (though not undue) exposure and influence. Sure, we have blogs, which encourage reader commentary, but this is exclusively at the sufferance of the page owner.
But now, with extrinsic annotations, anyone can comment on anyone's web page and have it appear in the context of that web page. I can comment on the White House press release, and so can everyone nut in the world. This is totally subversive and can easily be used for good or evil, but since this is the web it will likely be used for spam and porn more than anything else.
The challenge is how do you prevent this approach from collapsing under the oppressive weight of the vast banality of mass humanity? The web had the same problem, which PageRank solved (in part). We may need something analogous to tame the new "meta web".
I've wanted to implement something like this for a long time, except my version would:
be just comments; it wouldn't style itself a "wiki"
store the comments on Usenet or some other distributed, open system
use optional PGP signatures in place of logins
have an optional, distributed, poster-based moderation system
What I mean by that last point is that you'd have the ability to 'mod up' posters rather than comments, and moreover your moderations would only apply to you. No one else would see your mods, nor would you see anyone else's, except that you would have the option to make your mods recursive: if you moderate Bob at +1, then maybe you would see Bob's +1-modded posters at +0.5, and those posters' +1-modded posters at +0.25, and so on.
Of course, the moderation and PGP signatures would be completely optional, and would be applied in addition to regular spam filtering like that of existing Usenet and email clients.
It's called a wiki, but from what I've seen I don't see any wiki functionality at all. It looks a lot more like a blog, or rather the comment section of a blog to me.
Why do the call it wiki when I can leave a comment, but not participate in a kind of "review of this page" site? Basically, when it is not a wiki?
There has been hundreds of such plugins for both IE and FF for ever. The problem with them is that they're not build in to the browser and no one uses them. Its quite possible it would be really small amount of users using it even if it was build-in, since its not really why the users are there on the site and it just forgots. It would probably be full of "nice site", "hi everybody!" and "first!1!" comments too.
The first iteration will have everybody posing unmoderated, and anon. The 4chan guys will quickly demonstrate to Google the foolish error of it's ways.
The second iteration will allow moderation via some sort of community ranking or tagging. This will seem awesome until the spammers write bots to boost their spam postings to the top of the moderation heap. Google will be shamed again.
The third iteration will allow people to create accounts, and track their karma. Users will be able to filter out comments below a certain level, and moderate statements they disagree with as 'trolls'.
Misnamed product (Score:5, Insightful)
The headline on Google's Get Google Sidewiki [google.com] page reads, "Contribute helpful information to any web page." Yet this is being released to the general public, which is the same group that is responsible for most of the crap already on the internet. SideWiki should probably be renamed to Creeping Crud (hello, Wizardry fans) to more accurately describe the end result. But hey, you have to run SideWiki in order to see other SideWiki users' crud, so I guess it's a closed universe and therefore okay.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
No more than a tech demo (Score:5, Interesting)
Despite the name, Sidewiki is not a wiki such that people can edit, prune, and synthesize information, nor is it moderated in any way. It's just a comment system, with no way to amplify the signal vs the noise. It's also unclear how people are supposed to use it- e.g., what to post (which is a significant failing imo). Interesting as an approach to layer user comments onto webpages, but not useful yet. Arstechnica pretty much nailed it with the following:
This new offering from Google is intriguing in some ways and it shows that the company is thinking creatively about how to build dialog and additional value around existing content. The scope and utility of the service seems a bit narrow. The random nature of the existing annotations suggest that the quality and depth of the user-contributed content will be roughly equivalent with the comments that people post about pages at aggregation sites like Digg and Reddit.
What makes Wikipedia content useful is the ability of editors to delete the crap and restructure the existing material to provide something of value. Without the ability to do that with Sidewiki, it's really little more than a glorified comment system and probably should have been built as such. As it stands, I think that most users will just be confused about what kind annotations they should post.
Re:No more than a tech demo (Score:5, Funny)
It's just a comment system, with no way to amplify the signal vs the noise.
Yo dawg, we'll just put a comment system in the comment system so we can comment on the comments on the web page while we comment on the web page.
Parent
Terrific. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Terrific. (Score:4, Insightful)
And spam. Lots and lots of spam
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
"astroturf" means fake testimonials, not ads, which are generally called "spam".
So saying "you can get this cheaper elsewhere" is not "astroturfing". A fake post from a "customer" saying "I bought this and it is wonderful" or "it really sucks" would be astroturfing.
Of course this will collect plenty of both spam and astroturf.
No Chrome? (Score:5, Interesting)
It takes the form of a plug-in to Firefox and Internet Explorer
What, Google aren't even releasing plug-ins for their own browser first? What kind of endorsement is that?
Re:No Chrome? (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re:No Chrome? (Score:5, Interesting)
Chrome will support it built in to the new version.
Hmm, wrong:
(from the Ars Technica comments)
Parent
One thing though.... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:One thing though.... (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:3)
Oh goody. Youtube comments everywhere (Score:5, Interesting)
Experience has provided me with some skepticism regarding the intelligence of crowds. This Sidewiki would be like having a running commentary on the web, written by the same type of people who write Youtube comments and -1 rated comments on Slashdot.
Thanks, but no thanks. Hope that one dies in beta, unless they figure out how to filter out the crap, and bring the valuable contributions to the top. They could start by testing their filters on Youtube.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The only way this could work is if site owners could somehow manage the content, perhaps by authorizing some users to leave comments. Or perhaps they'll work it like Adwords, where the highest-paying contributor is listed first -- and maybe the site is paying for that. Or there would be some kind of vetting process for contributors.
Never mind. You're right, it will never work.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
How to resolve Troll comments (Score:3, Insightful)
Add a rating system, not unlike Amazon has for it's products. Basically, viewers can rate the comments up or down; significantly negative comments will eventually be eaten by the system. Significantly good comments will be presented in order of appearance. Additionally, it would be good to have a section presenting the 3 comments with the fewest votes, so the viewer would be likely to add his own vote to those.
Re:Oh goody. Youtube comments everywhere (Score:5, Interesting)
Did you not read the links from TFA:
http://www.google.com/support/toolbar/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=157294 [google.com]
It might work, or it might suck. Only one way to find out...
Parent
No Thanks. (Score:3, Insightful)
Mission Implausible (Score:5, Insightful)
Hard to see how this would be useful without moderation. Hard to see how moderation could be implemented in a practical way.
Re:Mission Implausible (Score:4, Insightful)
Agreed, there's no practical way to moderate comments. Everyone, mod parent up!
Parent
Sync With Other Commenting Apps (Score:3, Insightful)
Sad and lame.
SearchWiki (Score:3, Interesting)
How do site owners disable it? (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't think any business wants comments from morons presented alongside official content. If google want to provide a service allowing people to comment on one of my personal sites, they can damn well provide a web reachable URL. There's no way I'm installing a plugin to keep track of what's going on outside my moderated commenting system.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
and what if I don't *want* comments on my site? (Score:5, Insightful)
I am a little disturbed that I cannot find reference to any way that the site owner can "opt out" of having a sidewiki hooked to their pages. At least with Microsoft SmartTags, there was a way to disable them with a meta tag in the html header, and unlike Microsoft, Google has enough geek fanboys who think Google shits gold out there to make this feature take off.
I used to have comments enabled on my Flickr photos, but jokers kept on leaving suggestive remarks about my wife (she's pretty hot, IMHO). So, I turned it off. When talking about this with a colleague yesterday, we came up with the "ugly kid" scenario:
Imagine you have a family site with pictures of your kids on it and some jerk writes, "man, you have ugly kids" on the sidewiki. What do you do? You can't remove it. Will it be filtered out automatically by Google with their so-called "quality algorithm"? Just because there will be no anonymous posts, don't think that people won't do things like this.
Seriously, has anyone seen anything about a way to turn this off for your site? I'm not against free speech and all that, just don't add it to *my* content without my permission. Whether sidewiki is considered part of the page content is academic: the visitor will see it attached to your page.
Re:and what if I don't *want* comments on my site? (Score:4, Funny)
Seriously, has anyone seen anything about a way to turn this off for your site?
Block FF, IE, and Chrome from accessing your site.
Parent
Re:and what if I don't *want* comments on my site? (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh boo hoo! And what if users TALK about your site using their vocal cords?? Site owners must have some technology for disabling users' vocal chords while accessing their sites.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
If users talk about my site, it isn't instantly accessible to the whole Internet in a permanently archive-able form.
It's a take on the Out of Sight, Out of Mind principle.
Re:and what if I don't *want* comments on my site? (Score:5, Funny)
I used to have comments enabled on my Flickr photos, but jokers kept on leaving suggestive remarks about my wife (she's pretty hot, IMHO).
Link, PLEASE!
Parent
Been there, Done that. (Score:5, Insightful)
All I can remember is the amount of spam and junk that was written up, mostly on webpages that people didn't like or who were rivals. A lot of companies got VERY upset about the system, and the company what created the software pulled it.
Bad idea. Put this one back in the box and try something else Google. Bad idea.
Yahoo already has Searchpad (Score:3, Insightful)
Yahoo already has Searchpad. Honestly, Yahoo's search results interface is chock full of features that people aren't noticing until someone like Google copies it.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
ah... that because no-one is using Yahoo. They rolled out a new portal the other day, did anyone notice? No.
a great glorious day in troll technology (Score:4, Funny)
the enemies of trolls are legion, and trolls are under siege. however, recent technological research has uncovered an entirely new parallel dimension of troll content overlaying the entire web, without any of the typical anti-troll technology in place
a fertile, virgin land, a new world, ready for colonization and plenty of glorious trolling like "no, u stfu!" and "This web page sounds like typical Obama style fascist socialism"
Subversive idea (Score:3, Insightful)
Extrinsic annotations. It is something that has certainly been talked about for years, though has never really gained much traction. It is also implicit (in part) in some standards like RDF. It comes down to this: How to you say something about content where you do not control the content, and still have your comments seen? Today, if the White House puts out a press release, you can certainly comment it on your blog, on Twitter, in comments to a news article, etc., but you have zero power to make your comments appear in the context of the original press release. The content author is king, and those with high Google PageRank have disproportionate (though not undue) exposure and influence. Sure, we have blogs, which encourage reader commentary, but this is exclusively at the sufferance of the page owner.
But now, with extrinsic annotations, anyone can comment on anyone's web page and have it appear in the context of that web page. I can comment on the White House press release, and so can everyone nut in the world. This is totally subversive and can easily be used for good or evil, but since this is the web it will likely be used for spam and porn more than anything else.
The challenge is how do you prevent this approach from collapsing under the oppressive weight of the vast banality of mass humanity? The web had the same problem, which PageRank solved (in part). We may need something analogous to tame the new "meta web".
Lemme sum up the comments.. (Score:4, Insightful)
1. Your gay!
2. This is gay
3. NOOB ASS
4. your a noob ass
5. your a fag
6. this is for fags!!
7. BuY v1agr4 n0w
8. 0b4ma will kill us all!!
So close yet so far (Score:3, Interesting)
What I mean by that last point is that you'd have the ability to 'mod up' posters rather than comments, and moreover your moderations would only apply to you. No one else would see your mods, nor would you see anyone else's, except that you would have the option to make your mods recursive: if you moderate Bob at +1, then maybe you would see Bob's +1-modded posters at +0.5, and those posters' +1-modded posters at +0.25, and so on.
Of course, the moderation and PGP signatures would be completely optional, and would be applied in addition to regular spam filtering like that of existing Usenet and email clients.
I had a plugin for Netscape 4 that did this (Score:3, Informative)
Back in 1996 or so I had a Netscape 4 plugin that did this.
Someone tries to do it again every few years.
*sigh*
People need to study their history.
Google may succeed in this because of the wide distribution of their toolbar, but that is the only difference in this effort.
More advertising? (Score:3, Interesting)
I wonder if Google will put advertising banners at the top of the sidewiki bar, as another way to make themselves money off other people's content?
Is it for sarcastic comments? (Score:3, Funny)
wiki ? (Score:3, Informative)
It's called a wiki, but from what I've seen I don't see any wiki functionality at all. It looks a lot more like a blog, or rather the comment section of a blog to me.
Why do the call it wiki when I can leave a comment, but not participate in a kind of "review of this page" site? Basically, when it is not a wiki?
Re:I had an idea like this once (Score:4, Insightful)
There has been hundreds of such plugins for both IE and FF for ever. The problem with them is that they're not build in to the browser and no one uses them. Its quite possible it would be really small amount of users using it even if it was build-in, since its not really why the users are there on the site and it just forgots. It would probably be full of "nice site", "hi everybody!" and "first!1!" comments too.
Parent
How this will unfold.... (Score:5, Funny)
The first iteration will have everybody posing unmoderated, and anon. The 4chan guys will quickly demonstrate to Google the foolish error of it's ways.
The second iteration will allow moderation via some sort of community ranking or tagging. This will seem awesome until the spammers write bots to boost their spam postings to the top of the moderation heap. Google will be shamed again.
The third iteration will allow people to create accounts, and track their karma. Users will be able to filter out comments below a certain level, and moderate statements they disagree with as 'trolls'.
It then will be the perfect system.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The trolls will stake out territories early, like a game of Risk, only with Slashdot instead of Kamchatka. We'll know this era as the Internet War.
whitehouse.gov will be an epic battlefield
Re:I had an idea like this once (Score:4, Insightful)
Even omitting the bullshit comments, these things can go two ways.
1) it'll remain unpopular, making sure that there are too few comments to ever make it useful.
2) it'll become popular, making sure there are too many comments to be usable.
Either way I'm taking the shortcut by just not bothering with it.
Parent
1960: Ted Nelson, Project Xanadu (Score:3, Informative)
Yes, it's a great idea, the only problem is making it actually work. Some folks have been trying for almost fifty years. [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
itll be 99% 0f the comments especially on slashdot
Actually it'll be "this sucks-beta".
Re:"this sucks" (Score:5, Funny)
Dear Google,
Bringing Digg to the whole Internet is NOT a Good Thing.
- The Internet
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
How else do you think google knows what comments are left for any particular page?
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Everyone worthwhile, then.