Interesting Ideas: Can You Peer Review The Entire Internet, Sentence By Sentence

from the more-truth,-less-FUD dept

One of the concerns many people have with the web is whether or not the content you come across is trustworthy. To be honest, to some extent I've always found this to be a feature, rather than a bug, in that it (hopefully) teaches people to be more skeptical of everything they read and to seek additional sources, opinions and viewpoints in determining what they really believe. However, it's definitely true that many people can get sucked in by less than credible information. There's an interesting project under way by some big names in the tech world, to try to create a product called Hypothes.is, which is described as:

An open-source, community-moderated, distributed platform for sentence-level annotation of the Web.

The goal being to allow people to "peer review" the web. The project is currently raising funds via Kickstarter to get a prototype together. There are definitely some interesting names involved with the project, including John Perry Barlow and Brewster Kahle. And, on top of that, I'm always in favor of anything that brings more truthfulness to discussions.

That said, I do wonder how useful or effective this will be. There have been a number of projects over the years that have tried to add annotation to the web. Over a decade ago, the one that had all the buzz was ThirdVoice. But no one used it. More recently, Google put forth a big effort with an annotation offering called SideWiki... and no one used it (leading Google to shut it down recently). There are still a bunch of other annotation systems, but it's not clear how much usage any of them really get.

So while I like the principles and the goal here, I'm curious as to how it's going to actually be made useful to the point that people find it worth using.

Filed Under: brewster kahle, hypothes.is, john perry barlow, open-source, peer review
Companies: google, kickstarter