Standing on the shoulders of web pages

Just to record that something I have wanted to have for a while now exists in the form of a sidebar from Google. They call it ‘Sidewiki’ and it allows people to start a stream of comments alongside any web page. In the background this gets stored somewhere by Google along with all the other stuff they seem to hang onto. I can’t judge it on a screenshot or a thirty-second video but it looks as if the weakness, if there is one, is the separation of the two streams (original, critique) into different areas of the page. This is OK for general commenting but does not support remarks specific to a single element (a word or a sentence for example). I’d like to be able to add simulated post-it notes in place on the page, but of course that would rapidly obliterate the original content. Perhaps there should be lines to connect comments with source text? No idea how that could be done, but hey.

And then of course there is the potential for drive-by abuse. We shall see how that one works out.

Thoughts: what happens when people use the Sidewiki to add comments to a blog post which has already has a comments facility? Are people who don’t have the Sidewiki installed going to be at a significant disadvantage: will it become an essential browser component?

Thanks to Slashdot for the nod.