Google Toolbar adds comments with Sidewiki by Tom Krazit, Webware (Sept 23)
Do you have the time or the will to comment on a website? Google will give you the wherewithal through the Google Toolbar.
"Sidewiki is a new addition to the Google Toolbar that will let users read comments on any Web site and add their own in a special interface on the left hand side of the screen enabled by the toolbar. This idea has been tried before by others, but Google is proposing to use an algorithm to rank comments by quality and to link comments to a user's Google Profile."
Also Google Sidewiki Allows Anyone To Comment About Any Site by Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Land (Sep 23)
Detailed instructions with screenshots. But will people use it? Sullivan points to several other attempts that turned into duds such as SearchWiki and Knol.
Of interest - "Sidewiki feels like another swing at something Google seems to desperately desires — a community of experts offering high quality comments. Google says that’s something that its cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin wanted more than a system for ranking web pages. They really wanted a system to annotate pages across the web."
Postscript - Sidewiki: One Big Google Headache? by Ian Paul, PC World via Business Week (Sep 24)
There is a backlash to SideWiki - "Jeff Jarvis, Google fanatic and author of "What Would Google Do?", is leading the anti-Sidewiki charge by saying Google is trying to "take interactivity away from the source and centralize it." In other words, Google is destroying the whole point of a blog by taking comments off the Web page and placing them beyond the control of the Web site owner."