I don’t get Social Annotation

Well, now I’ve said it. I’m not worried that God will smite me down; plenty of people don’t get it, which is partly why its life as a concept has been so troubled.

The concept is straightforward: social interaction has enlivened blogs and birthed chat and wikis; social annotation extends the concept of community, interaction and sharing to the entire web. Social Annotation tools allow people to visit any website, comment on stories, share thoughts with others, make notes to themselves. Here’s one description: a giant transparency overlaying all web pages, and users have the markers.

The idea has been around for a long time, with companies like Third Voice offering tools for such interactions in the late 1990’s. I tried a couple of them at the time and while they worked well enough, I couldn’t figure out why I should care about leaving marks on other pages. I remember scanning through many well-trafficked pages without seeing comments, leaving me wondering if I was the only one using the software. And the comments I did find left by others were stupid, infantile.

As Jeremy Wagstaff writes in his blog, social annotation is back. He’s started a list of the various tools that are on the market. His gut feeling seems to be that this time, social annotation is here to stay,

but the [programs] which work will be those that allow either everyone, or groups of users to see each other’s comments on web pages, and to leverage tagging and other new things we’ve gotten used to see comparable pages. And some way of filtering out the silliness would be good.

What nags me about this is the question of identity and utility. Is it comments? Is it bookmarking? Is the sum of the two greater than the parts? Having  a comment function is good but many websites already offer that. The concept is close to social bookmarking, like del.icio.us. Many users of del.icio.us make comments about the pages they visit in the notes section for individual bookmarks. Of course, it’s not interactive, and it’s also located on a separate website.

So let’s look at utility. If a site has a solid comment function with a large number of regular users, why wouldn’t you leave your comment there, rather than using a closed comment system, seen only by users of that particular software? If you use a social bookmarking tool like del.icio.us or any of its competitors, why would you use this tool?

I’m not canning the idea, but I’m trying to figure out whether putting together both the comment and bookmark functions AND removing them from open spaces to spaces walled in by software actually accomplishes anything.

If you have any thoughts, comment away. In the meantime, I’ll try out a couple of the tools and see what I can see.