Anyhoo, here's the state of the art as of August 12, 2013.
From the Nieman Journalism Lab:
From Medium’s Notes to The New York Times’ Quips, lots of publishers are dabbling in annotated commenting. Can they make it stick?
Last week, Quartz became the latest in a succession of media companies to begin experimenting with a new type of commenting system. As a number of media companies reconsider how to deal with comments, everyone’s taking a slightly different approach. Quartz, for instance, isn’t calling their new system comments, but instead “annotations.” While the methods differ across the web, the desire to fix the comments problem while making engagement meaningful — an added value rather than “broken windows” — is a shared motivation.
Annotations may be one solution. The earliest annotations were considered marginalia — doodles and pictures that run along the sides of early texts, that helped readers to focus and to understand. As students, the act of making notations as you read can help with understanding the material better, not only for yourself but for the person reading after you.
But bringing that kind of networked communication to media on the web, however, presents some challenges. For one, not everyone agrees on issues of privacy and identity — should individuals have standardized profiles across all platforms, or are certain elements of anonymity too important to let go? There are also technical issues to contend with. Web wide annotation is an enormous undertaking, and pushing publishers towards a system that works together — not to mention building it — remains a challenge. And of course, there are still questions of how readers would want that system to look and act.
Recently the Lab has been chatting with some of the innovators in media who have focused their energies on building annotated platforms. How do you elevate the practice of commenting on media while also making conversations across the web frictionless? Below are some examples from Quartz, The New York Times, The Financial Times, and SoundCloud’s time commenting to Medium’s still-developing Notes platform, as well as entrepreneur Dan Whaley’s search for an open, annotated browser....MORE
