| I recall some efforts to make a social browser, where people visiting a web page could leave comments on it and read comments from others. IIRC (and I fear I don't RC), the web industry hated this idea because they couldn't control and monetize the conversation around their content. Of course, we now do this exact thing with sites like Slash Dot, Digg, and Hacker News, only there is this step of going to the social site to see the popular links. If you go to a page and wonder what HN has to say about it, you have to do a search for the URL by yourself. (Perhaps there is a browser add-on that does this?) Taking comments to a place where you could annotate the document and not just discuss the page as a whole is the next step for sites like HN. Of course, there is the pesky problem of the sites hating this and using every legal tool in their arsenal to prevent you from presenting this as an interface. |
Maybe with the current generation of browsers there is another way to achieve the same effect.
On websites with lots of visitors this would likely not work but then you might limit the visible entries to those from some slice through the population based on certain criteria (location or other demographic data).