TechCrunch covers web annotations

Too bad TechCrunch didn't decide to write this article about web annotations a month and a half later. Otherwise, I would hope that we were on it because I think Artoo is in the same product space but does web annotations much better.

Annotating the web is definitely not a new idea, as the article points out. However, I think we have a better idea of what kinds of annotations users actually want to utilize now than we did before. We also know that users have something valuable to contribute to a website. I think that the solutions covered by TechCrunch don't quite have the right understanding still.

If you squint your eyes del.icio.us is nothing more than a web annotation tool. It lets users decorate a site with a few tags to describe it, although no one cares what these tags are once they get to a website. It's a tiny way to remix the web.

These tools go far beyond the functionality of del.icio.us, of course. The annotation is supposed to enhance the browsing experience once a user has reached a page. This is exactly the goal of Artoo.

I really think that the latest generation of annotation tools misses the point of what users want yet again. 'Web graffiti' is too harsh of a term to describe them, but not much too harsh. They focus on text and actual markups on the physical page. They expect that whoever has something worth saying about the page also runs across the page and has the plugin installed. They also expect that users viewing annotations on a page trust the block of text or inline image left by some other user. This is the crux of their shortcomings: they believe that annotations can stand on their own.

I fundamentally disagree that an annotation can stand on its own. Artoo abstracts the notion of an annotation by adding a level of indirection. Rather than letting a user's contribution atop a site stand alone, Artoo gives the annotation context and legitimacy. A web resource (anyone have a better name for this? I mean a video, a picture, a web page, just any piece of content.) can stand on its own, for it is used to doing that. Yelp.com reviews exist perfectly well far away from the things they review because Yelp is an entity on its own with its own sense of legitimacy. A random inline annotation on a webpage has no such luck; it is untrustworthy by default because this is the wild, wild web.

The simple addition of indirection makes Artoo innovative far beyond what anyone will call web graffiti. I wish TrailFire, Stickis, ShiftSpace, Fleck, and Diigo all the best, but their products are inherently limited when compared to Artoo.