Workshop on WWW and Collaborative Work

During the summer of 1994, I decided to take a stab at implementing an annotation service called `Public Annotations'. The results of this work can be found at: http://playground.sun.com/~gramlich/1994/annote/index.html

A link to this work can be found on the collaboration page at the W3C web site: http://www.w3.org/hypertext/WWW/Collaboration/Overview.html

This public annotation system is both a functioning collaboration system and a failure in that nobody uses it. The purpose of my presentation is to delve into the causes of the failure and present a follow on system that overcomes most of the problems with the first system.

The primary problems with `Public Annotations' are:

• The first problem with `Public Annotations' is that is that it required server modifications. This prevented it from being widely deployed at all.
• The second problem was that `Public Annotations' required each annotation to be published on the global web. Since many people are accessing the Web from behind a firewall, they are unable to publish their annotations to the global Web.
• The third problem was that no group annotations were supported. I am of the opinion that most people will eventually stop reading group annotations due to the lack of editorial standards.

The successes of `Public annotations' are:

• In-line annotations worked. Using pattern matching to find the insertion point worked as well.
• Using the Mosaic personal annotation facility to provide easy generation of public annotations worked quite well.
• Since I never finished writing a `Public Annotations' paper and submitted it for publication in a journal, it is not a finished work. However, since I made it available via the Web, numerous other researchers in the field have been able to find it and learn from the effort.