Google Sidewiki

A few days ago Google announced a new project of theirs: Google Sidewiki. Visit that link for details, but the gist is that if you have the Google Toolbar installed, you can browse the Web with a new sidekick on the edge of your browser. This sidekick will comment on the page you are looking at for you, and you can in turn comment on the page as well. The idea is that experts can add more information, say about a medical or science page. But any page can have a Sidewiki, and some of the information will apparently be generated automatically based on other pages, blog posts, etc. Here's Google's video about it:



This is not a particularly new idea. I remember years ago, someone introduced a browser plugin that you could use to comment directly on Web pages... almost like taking out your can of spray paint and tagging the page with your gang sign. The reason that didn't fly at the time was this: Web page owners don't WANT people adding content to their Web pages. If they did, they would add comment boxes at the bottom. By piggybacking other content onto an existing site, you're infringing on the page owner's right to control what comes up when their domain name is accessed. I don't know if there is a legal challenge there (I doubt it), but there is certainly a moral responsibility to not "walk on my lawn", so to speak. I don't remember what the name of that project was, but this post mentions a couple of other current similar

And what about pages that do already have a commenting mechanism? What about this page, for example? It looks like that's already happening... read to the bottom of this page and you'll find that the page's author wound up having to mess with two sets of comment threads, one on his page and one in the sidewiki. Kind of a pain in the neck for the page author, don't you think?

And what am I supposed to do when someone emails me and says they saw something specifically on one of my pages, but it wasn't actually there? It was in Sidewiki, and I don't know about it. Or it was in Sidewiki when they visited the page, but it has since been deleted, moved, demoted, or otherwise obscured, so now even if I look at Sidewiki, I still don't see it. Users are not always educated very well in the tools they're using; this adds a layer of complexity that I'm not interested in trying to deal with.

I can't imagine how Google will deal with exceptions to the standard "rules" in Web page design: dynamically-generated pages and pages that utilize frames, for example. I know frames are oh-so-1997, but I was just updating a framed site for a friend of mine. Does Sidewiki follow the frame on the left, or the frame on the right? I hope the one on the right, because that's where the content is. But do I as the Webmaster have any control over what page Sidewiki follows? I don't think so.

In order to see the Sidewiki, you apparently have to be using Google Toolbar in your browser (actually, it looks like it may have to be this special version of the toolbar). I am not interested in adding toolbars to my browsers. I use tons of Firefox add-ons, but not toolbars. Why? Because a toolbar is a jack-of-all-trades, and we know how many things a JOAT is a master of. I would MUCH rather pick and choose only the "tools" I want to use rather than have a whole "toolbar" foisted on me. As often as not, they are resource hogs, and the last thing I need is one more piece of software eating my CPU cycles and dragging down my performance. So I avoid toolbars, and unless Google comes out with a Firefox add-in to see their Sidewiki (and since they've created a public API, I'm sure someone will do it very soon), I probably won't ever see it... and even if I do eventually see it, it will be only to protect the content of my own pages, not as a willing participant.