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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

So who manages Annotation Central? Disqus? Google? Facebook? The State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television of the People's Republic of China?

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Part of the goal of making it a standard, and one in particular where annotation clients could listen to multiple annotation service providers, is precisely to avoid "Annotation Central". Our client does not currently operate this way, but our intention is to move that direction this year. Many underlying architectural changes are being made now to support that change.

Okay, to make this proposal work in practice initially, we do need some annotation service provider(s).

Who is both (a) eager to be one and do the integration before there is a market/large community and (b) is trustworthy enough to be included by default in the largest likely annotation clients such as the major web browsers?

To state the obvious-- Hypothesis is eager, and is running one. If we can be so bold, we think we are also trustworthy. We knew that this could not work unless we also created a service.

We welcome all others.

What do you need a central entity for?

Both the sending and receiving parties must subscribe to the same annotation service, or the annotation won't be visible. This assumes annotation is not being controlled by the site hosting the web page.

Third-party annotation has been tried, and web site operators hated it. Look up "Third Voice".

I'd say not having a central annotation service that everybody uses, but being able to pick and choose (RSS-feed like?) is quite an important part of it, if you don't want total overload.

There's a network effect. You have to be on the same annotation service as the people whose annotations you want to see. This leads to centralization.

I think it's more akin to clustering. There might be an HN annotation service that lawers would rarely use and vice versa.

I don't really feel so - as long as there's overlap in reputation, the network effects would favour "HN annotation service" and "lawyer annotation service" to be done by the same provider, simply different people would annotate different websites simply they each visit a different subset of them.

Kind of like the Stackexchange network of sites - many different communities, but with significant overlap as many users are active in multiple domains.

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