Perry

Hewitt

Tag: annotations

Friday 5 — 10.24.2014
1. Analytics firm Chartbeat has opened up its measurement methodology, limitations and all. By exposing their thinking and technology, they give the service’s users better insight into their reports — and simultaneously ramp up the pressure on the competition to go transparent.
2. Now that we’ve all given up on comments, annotation is on the rise. The Genius platform continues its quest to annotate everything through social reading. Spend a little time with Tech Genius to see how people dissect and discuss noteworthy texts.
3. Pew released a sobering report on the state of online harassment. Younger adults are more likely to have experienced some kind of harassment, from name calling to physically threats. Young women experience particular, severe forms of harassment, with a full 26% reporting that they have been stalked online. See also: #GamerGate.
4. Before you respond to that email, pause. This HBR post explains how to improve your communications by being a little less quick on the draw with the send button.
5. It’s the end of apps as we know them. The mobile experience will be less about sifting through app icons spanning multiple screens, and more about apps sitting in the background, serving up relevant content as needed.
Weekend fun: How many times has your heart beat? How has the planet changed around you during your lifetime, from animal extinctions to solar eclipses? Check out this clever, interactive visualization from the BBC.

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective pointers to compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally. Try out the Friday 5 archive, or sign up for a weekly email.
October 24, 2014
How to solicit smart comments

Articles about the complex issues affecting women in the workplace are lightning rods for impassioned conversation. This New York Times article on gender equity at Harvard Business School was bound to elicit strong opinions, just like the original 2003 Opt Out Revolution piece and its 2013 sequel (spoiler alert: damned if you do, damned if you don’t). [tweetable hashtags=”#content”]How can editors ensure thoughtful conversation and minimize ad hominem, all-caps outrage?[/tweetable]
Midway through the HBS article, the Times article introduces a full-width block with three specific questions to respond to:

It’s an Oprah’s book club type of approach, with an entire section of questions for readers to consider. Rather than a mass call for comments, it’s a prompt for directed discussion. The mid-way through placement is smart, giving readers questions to consider as they (presumably) finish the piece. Mid-stream blocks with calls to action can be surprisingly successful. Analytics pros will be taking a hard look at the comments originating with a click here versus those starting from the text block at the bottom.

There’s a nice segmentation of the comments at the bottom, where you can read the comments not only by question but by author: all, business school alumni, recent graduates, men, and women. Again, the questions remain highly visible at left and up top.

Previously, I took a look at the rising use of annotation — here’s a good example of an annotated piece on opting-out at Medium. These are all valiant swings at a pernicious, unsolved problem: how to benefit from the wisdom of the crowd while keeping comments from devolving into an angry lowest common denominator? The article on the HBS gender equity experiment will no doubt put this approach to the test.

September 8, 2013
What is an annotation on the web?

A new content type, user annotation, has been cropping up on popular websites lately. An annotation allows site visitors to interact directly with a chunk of content rather than scroll to the bottom of a page to leave a comment. User-contributed annotations are not only a way for readers to interact with text, but for users to engage with other media like images on Gawker and audio files on Soundcloud.

Unlike threaded commenting, which descends all-too-frequently into a cage fight of the uninformed versus the enraged, annotations offer the hope that civil discourse can occur when users interact directly with the content. User contributions are marked by a small icon (in this case, a 1) that other site visitors can click on to expand:

How do you create an annotation? Here’s what the process of leaving an annotation looks like on Quartz:

Clicking on the + box brings up a simple text field to submit an annotation. Site authors and editors can moderate the content before it is posted, and reward thoughtful contributions by featuring or replying to the annotation.

See the Citi logo at top right of the text field? That’s a clever revenue approach to have corporate sponsors underwrite a specific technical feature. Sponsoring technical features offers a promising complement to a predominantly native advertising business model used by many news sites — with fewer of the underlying editorial concerns.

Annotations have been around forever in academia, but this relatively new web behavior will be familiar to a wider group of people who use comments in ubiquitous desktop applications like Word or PowerPoint.

The days of sitting back and passively viewing content are, for good or for ill, over. Finding ways for people to interact with content that encourage new ideas or productive debate is the new nut to crack.

August 12, 2013