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In this episode, Peter Brantley, the director of scholarly communication at the start-up Hypothes.is, talks with host Stewart Wills about the firm’s efforts to build an open annotation layer on the Web, his thoughts on how in-line annotation differs, in both spirit and potential, from the more common practice of online comment streams, and some possible applications in scholarly communication, publishing, and peer review.

Was Mosaic nicht schaffte, will nun das Projekt Hypothes.is erreichen. 2011 als Crowdfunding-Projekt gestartet, macht das Nonprofit-Projekt seitdem immer wieder kleine Fortschritte. Am Ende soll eine verteilte, offene Plattform stehen, über die Nutzer wie im Peer-Review-Verfahren der Wissenschaft einzelne Sätze markieren und Informationen bewerten können. Statt Kommentar-Inseln auf einzelnen Websites oder bei Twitter entstünde ein über das Netz waberndes Band an Anmerkungen – so zumindest die Idee.

This kind of tool has the potential to further democratize the web, by making the comments and conversation surrounding a piece of writing just as important — if not moreso — than the original text. That is something compelling that could, and would, bring me out of my RSS shell and back onto the open web.

I think the way tech first evolved, it was highly community-oriented and focused on shared goals and shared objectives, and I think we lost some of that,” says Whaley. “But I think there are elements of it that are coming back, because of the explosion of open source and collaborative systems, and also some fatigue with the commercial infrastructure we conduct our affairs on — Facebook, Twitter, and so forth. They give us service we want, but impose a tax for doing so, and, for me — I think there’s a different future.

Thinking back to the foundation of the World Wide Web, annotation was actually a critical component of what Sir Tim Berners-Lee conceived of as an interconnected store of research documents for CERN.

Première différence, cependant : Hypothes.is est indépendante, open source, à but non lucratif et utilise les standards du W3C. Elle sera donc financée en partie par nous-mêmes et par des fonds publics. Le rachat de GoodReads par Amazon a démontré la nécessité de ce type d’argument : vos productions textuelles sont garanties d’être pérennes, parce que ce sont en partie vos dons qui assurent la viabilité de la plateforme.

Using reputation-modeling that privileges people who actually know about stuff, the system creates information trails, showing what research or news preceded the text in question, and what other work it led to afterwards. "This is collaborative research that blurs the line between pre- and post-publication," he says.

Obviously, the existence of such a system, as it is envisioned by the founders, would be a startling addition to human knowledge. And a very controversial one. Imagine reading an annotated NY Times, where the pros and cons of Paul Krugman's thoughts on the Euro could be argued by the world's great economists. Or your sister could annotate online recipes on Epicurious. Or a company's claims about their product's capabilities and value could be countered by disgruntled customers.

Maybe that is why there is now a renewed appetite for exploring ways of facilitating commenting across the Internet that give more control to individuals. Many of those interested in seeing that happen-- including start-ups, academics, libraries and early adopters-- came to San Francisco this week for the I Annotate conference. It was a discussion about discussion.

Hypothes.is aims to leave a digital trail of people's thought processes as they traipse across the Web. At the "I Annotate" conference this April, a wide swath of the digital publishing community will take the next steps toward building this infrastructure.