This week, Google announced the launch of SideWiki, a browser add-on that allows users to annotate Web pages with their own insights. “Wiki” is a misnomer; the tool doesn’t let you edit content, only add to it. In practice, as others have noted, it resembles a comment thread more than a wiki.
The novelty here is less in the idea than the source. Web annotation has had a storied history, but it’s seen marginal user adoption. (Interested in other implementations? Start with this TechCrunch article.)
Any Google product launch tends to draw a lot of attention, however, and SideWiki can be bundled with the Google Toolbar and Google Chrome browser, possibly giving it a better shot at success than an upstart like the recent and similarly-featured DotSpots.
If you dig the aspect of these tools that allows your content to be annotated with material from elsewhere, you should also check out Apture. Although it’s not open to your users, it allows you to layer your own stories with content from sites such as Wikipedia, Flickr and YouTube, or other material that you provide. It’s available as an easy plugin for WordPress, Drupal, Blogger and the like, and can integrate with many other platforms.
SideWiki is also a good reminder that every day, we control a little bit less of the conversation around our content. Publishers have been acclimating themselves to this fact for a while, but it can still feel jarring when the Gawker post about a story gets nearly as many comments as the story itself.
Even Jeff Jarvis, normally seen telling publishers to stop obsessing about their destinations and embrace disaggregation, was stung by the sight of a Google-hosted comment stream sitting alongside his own.
Comments on your stories have already escaped to Twitter. Some fraction of your users will probably click the comment link on the DiggBar that frames your story before they ever think to use your comment box.
A Knight News Challenge project called Media Bugs will allow your users to post corrections about your content to somewhere other than your site — not that they aren’t doing this already. (Disclaimer: I’m filling in as the Online Community Manager for Knight.)
SideWiki may sink or swim, but the increasingly distributed conversation it reflects is probably not going anywhere. Meanwhile, I await the public beta of another Google product promising a new paradigm for conversation — Google Wave.
