Oh man, those newspaper dinosaurs are at it again. Listen to their complaints about a new Web tool:

We’re losing control over our content!

It opens the door for someone to post malicious comments about us!

This doesn’t help our site! Google is benefiting from it, but not us!

It’s another thing we have to monitor!

This is OUR site. We can’t just let anybody post whatever they want on here!

Get with the times, you Luddites, or you’re going to go extin … wait, what? Those aren’t comments from cavemen in the newspaper biz?

Instead, they’re reactions from some in the blogosphere to Google’s newly introduced Sidewiki, a Web annotation tool. Among its loudest critics is Jeff Jarvis, whose reaction I find surprising and ironic because he has often blasted traditional media for having similar sentiments about the Web. I can’t help but find some of this kind of hypocritical.

Louis Gray has a nice response to criticism of Sidewiki from Jarvis and Steven Hodson. I share many of Gray’s sentiments. In the spirit of the subject matter and to sadistically fragment the online conversation even further, I thought it only fitting to comment on both of those critical posts via a Web annotation tool (just click those links above).

I tried out Sidewiki for a little bit and thought it was alright, though its interface and features can certainly stand to improve (threading comments would be nice, for one thing). I do like the concept of Web annotation. I use Diigo, and I find it useful, but I don’t think Web annotation is a replacement or even a legitimate competitor for the typical commenting feature you see on blogs and other sites, and I believe using it as such would be a mistake. That’s why I don’t think blogs with a decent commenting system really have to worry about losing a lot of their conversations to this. We might see people try to use it that way in the beginning, but as with anything else, I think a set of best practices will emerge for Web annotation tools if they ever catch on.

I find Web annotation tools most useful when I want to highlight and comment on specific sections of a page that I’m sharing with someone else. Annotation tools also come in handy when I want to comment on a passage inline — when that context is important — rather than post a comment after the article and have to cite the passage to which I’m responding. It is also helpful when I’m writing a blog entry to respond to significant, separate portions of an article, a situation where the standard blogging practice of quote-and-comment would mean quoting nearly every segment of the article, which I feel like essentially constitutes stealing the content of the article. So instead of quote-and-comment, I just include a link to an annotated page in those instances. So mostly, I don’t use Web annotation as a conversation tool with the general public that’s reading the article, but rather as a way to highlight something within the article when I’m sharing it with a specific few people.

Related Note

Aside from Jarvis and Hodson’s posts, Gray’s piece also links to a post by Josh Schnell titled “Content Aggregators are Killing Content Creators.” As I read it, I couldn’t help but laugh at the irony. While the article is complaining about social networks like Digg and Friendfeed, if you replace those terms with the word “blogs”, you’ll have a virtually verbatim copy of newspapers’ angst about how the Internet is making it difficult for journalists to make a living from their content.