Content Honored

“Using Sidenotes, publishers and readers can generate thoughtful reactions to any type of online content from articles to lyrics to live updates and more. Whether inspired or curious for more information, a reader can Sidenote any part of an article — a paragraph, a sentence, a quote, or an image.” Comments on these individual “social objects” will be placed right alongside stories instead of way down below them (congratulations), but will be hidden by default (oh, hahaha). Of course nobody asked for this, or else it wouldn’t be an innovation.

I am grateful to LiveFyre for at least sketching out an honest philosophy for this creeping and inevitable annotations thing, which seems to have been accepted as the only possible alternative to getting rid of comments altogether. No dissembling in this video: “When you’re reading an article, a book; when you’re looking at an image gallery, when you’re watching a video, it’s hardly ever the entire thing that really gets your attention.” This is probably true, but it’s awfully courageous to say it to everyone’s face.