I was just thinking about the much hyped third voice the other night. Third voice let you make notes on any page on the web, and other users of the software could see your notes and you in turn could see theirs.
I haven't heard about them for a while, and I vaguely remembered some kind of
controversy (
or maybe a security hole?) about it.
It turns out that thirdvoice died the same way that most other dot coms did. They ran out of money for their free service.
But I thought the concept could lend itself to an open protocol with a distributed architecture. So I checked into it, and there's some interesting annotation software out there.
Annotation Engine does annotations with a perl script on the server. The script acts as a proxie, adding the comments into the HTTP stream as it relays the requested URL.
Here is this post as seen through Annotation Engine. (no style sheets, unfortunately)
I loaded my own page in there and I realized that with my RSS feed, there were at least three processes (on three servers) involved in generating/filtering the page I was viewing.
Then I found
annotea, built into the amaya browser. My idea that the wholy owned server that thirdVoice used could be distributed is realized here, as are lots of good ideas placing annotations in the context of the semantic web. I may have to devote a future posting to this.
http://xanadu.com.au/ may allow annotating, but Xanadu seems to be aimed solidly at the next decade, oops, while having died in the last.
crit.org does annotations and backlinks, all server side. You can run their server too. Doesn't work on my page, I don't know why.
It occurs to me that I could run a server side annotation package as a supplement to my weblog. The entry point would be a list of pages that DO HAVE annotations.
Dated: 09/27/2002