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I love the word marginalia
So the idea started with building an index of Gimcrack’d — only instead of looking up specific keywords, we’d organize different passages by theme — first love, bad jokes, recipes — or something like that. But then the thought occurred: why should we be the ones that should come up with the categories? Let our wondrous readers do so (if they wanted to — which is very much an open question.) And then I further considered: why constrain readers to only tagging passages? Shouldn’t they be able to scribble as much as they like?
An aside on Web page annotation: it’s never really worked in the past. The earliest famous example was Third Voice, which offered a plugin that would display user comments on Web sites as you browse. The beauty of the system was that it offloaded all the work onto Third Voice’s own servers; right off the gate, the network effect was hard at work. It also deftly dodged the issue of intellectual property; you could compare it to graffiti, but a special kind that was only visible to people wearing the right kind of glasses. Nevertheless, Web site owners flipped out. Their Web sites were theirs to clutter up with crap — sort of a touching throwback to New Criticism, where authorial intent was king.
(Wait a minute, was that an actual lit-crit reference?)
The stage was set for a battle royale… but then the wheels fell of Third Voice’s wagon when they ran out of money. And most of the comments were crap. So much for that. This new site, Gabbly, works on the same principle, only it’s a live chat, so there’s no permanence to your comments. I kind of wonder if it’ll flame out too — I imagine for different reasons. I just don’t see a) where the um, business model is b) that there’s that much connection between people who happen to visit the same site. I mean, I‘d probably enjoy talking to Gimcrack’d visitors (but would they want to talk to me?), but I don’t feel that compelled to chat with people reading bash.org, for example.
But then I’m probably the wrong test case for this. Once I bought a book of essays at a used book store (that doubled as a furniture store) that was full of scribblings on the side and bits circled that the previous owner liked. Eventually I figured out she (maybe it was just handwriting, but I immediately imagined it as a she) was an aspiring writer who was trying to learn the craft, who was full of desire and ambition but hadn’t yet found fulfillment. That side story made the mostly dry stories so much more interesting. On the other hand, I find the idea of writing in the margins of a boom sort of repulsive — in an intellectual way. I just don’t want to mark up this beautiful pristine book. Highlighting especially seems gross to me.
So anyway: I am at least tentatively beginning development of a plugin for TiddlyWiki that lets visitors comment on specific passages (in the parlance: tiddlers). The idea being to do some minimal PHP glue between some macros you paste into your wiki and a brain-dead MySQL database.
I realize it’s kind of funny to announce this right after I theorize that Web commentary is a bad idea, but there are still a couple reasons to make sense to me.
- It should be interesting from a technical point of view.
The real fun in Web programming right now is mixing up languages and client/server processing. It seems sort of interesting to try to figure out an efficient yet snazzy way to track. - Maybe people will leave comments on our stories.
Linking it to this blog hasn’t really borne fruit. I’m not sure why this is, but hey — might as well try a different approach. Feedback is golden when you’re writing for free — it’s the prehistoric equivalent of Whuffie. - It’s a nice thing to do for the community.
There’s a small but robust TiddlyWiki community, and my other work hasn’t really shown up on the radar there — mainly because it was very Gimcrack’d-oriented. This is too, but hopefully I can make it generic enough to work for everyone.
So… anyone want to post some comments on commenting?
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