Web annotation 2.0
Back at the dawn of time, NCSA Mosaic allowed you to annotate web sites that you visited. The annotations weren’t actually stored on the sites, of course, but were (if I remember correctly) saved locally on your hard drive. I really liked the feature and was disappointed that it didn’t make the transition to Netscape. Several years later, however, a couple of startups, most notably Third Voice, launched collaborative annotation services, in which anyone could annotate sites and have their comments stored on a server. Third Voice was instantly hit with threats of lawsuits by companies that believed its service would “deface” their sites, and the company completely changed its business model and then vanished in the bubble 1.0 collapse. Fortunately, Web 2.0 means everything old is new again, and there are now a handful of new “social” (collaborative is so Web 1.0) bookmarking services that are far more robust and user friendly than Third Voice ever was. The latest on the scene is Fleck, which Download Squad wrote up yesterday. It’s a slick little app, and I plan on using it regularly. Let’s just hope that the anti-annotation forces have gotten some 2.0 religion and will leave the sector alone this time around.
