Commenters’ heaven! Add uppity notes to Google Book Search Settlement docs

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By David Rothman

I’m right across the Potomac from BS City.

Oh how I‘d love to be able to annotate the malarkey in so many documents out of Capitol Hill and maybe the White House, too.

For now, uppity people can exercise their skills on something else, documents associated with the proposed Google Book Search Settlement.

Creator of the markup site is SharedBook, Inc., which is cleverly using the settlement-related docs to demo the annotation aspects of its services.

Meanwhile look beyond the GBS app and think about annotated e-books. High time that the IDPF took the shared annotations issue more seriously and worked on appropriate standards! Amazon, after all, is already moving in this direction.

The obvious questions: What annotation sites exist to let anyone mark up federal documents here in the States? Elsewhere? Any sites from governments themselves? And via APIs, standards and in other ways,  just how can governments foster the growth of such sites? Also, what about the issue of special interest groups using the sites without identifying themselves? What place is there for anonymous comments? What to do about deliberate information? And how does the media fit in, given all the enticing linking possibilities? The issues go on and on.

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