 I will try and keep the energy levels high for the last session. I'm excited to go last, but I'm also upset that I go last, because then I don't get to start this tradition, which is, what's your favorite annotation? Guys, come on. This is my favorite annotation. It's a little Mediodoodle that Copernicus drew in the margin of his, on the revolutions of heavenly bodies, or whatever it is, in somewhere around 1543, shows that I'm not the only one doodling in the margins. OK, so this is me, my website. My name is Tom Critchlow. I am a strategy consultant by day. I work for myself, so I work with a lot of different kinds of companies. A lot of them are media companies. And if anyone wants to talk about the role of annotation in media and editorial workflows in particular, I would love to talk about that. That's not what I'm talking about today. I'm also a blogger, and that's what I'm talking about a bit more today. I have a now page on my website that lists a bit more of my varied interests and things that I have going on. If you guys aren't familiar with now pages, this is a great thing started by Derek Severs, which will just be a bit of a tradition. And I want to talk a little bit about how I find love with annotations and how I use them in blogging or network writing, as I like to call blogging, a more fancy term. People look down at me sometimes as a blogger. Hopefully no one in this room does that. So this is the beginnings, which is just as a great blog post by Austin Cleon called Reading with a Pencil, and this idea of reading texts closely and your marginalia and so on, which I'm sure is not used to anyone in this room. This kind of started me thinking about this whole idea quite a few years ago about the role that marginalia plays in the web, in particular, about how that's often missing in many ways. All the way through to my own lived experience, this is a screenshot of a blog post in Google Docs form. So when I do my blogging, I often write the longer pieces as Google Docs and share them around to people I know, friends, friends of friends, people on Twitter that I meet. Those sparks are kind of a healthy debate and conversation, often corrections in the margins. And that this all kind of gets stripped away when you publish back to the web. All of this is basically just copy and pasting a text in the middle and publishing it into my CMS. And that was a shame. That felt like a waste that these are really valuable things that people are adding. And not only are they valuable, but they're also attributed. So when I publish the final piece, I'm taking up credit and attribution for all these things by trying to attribute where I can. But it's nice to have people's faces and names and comments there. That led all the way through to a little bit later on, stumbling across the hypothesis tool, and starting to use this on friends, blog posts, where I felt like a close reading was necessary. So this is a good friend of mine, Toby Shorin, has a blog called Subpixel Space. And he wrote already a blog post that I already loved, but that I disagreed with sections of. And so I went through and did a close reading and said, hey, I really like this bit. This is good. This is strong. There's a section of the argument here that falls down for me. And this is basically me using hypothesis as a Google Docs kind of replacement of a way to say, hey, I want to come say something about the thing that you wrote. And that was a really great discussion. And then that led me all the way through to the last six months I've been writing a book. I've been posting the chapters or chapter-like objects to my blog and to my blog post to be getting it a little longer. And I wanted to start retaining this idea of marginalia and side notes. So this is the current template that I use on my blog, which is longer form inspired of a thing called Tufti CSS, if any of you are familiar. But it just lets me add these side notes, but they're not interactive. You can see on mobile that collapsed by default and they can open up. But these are still just static things that I put into the publishing workflow, even though I've started to use these for some of the attribution things. So when a post starts as Google Docs gets a comment that I really like, I will take that comment and copy and paste that into the margins. But it's still a clunky and a static, and it still lacks some of that core attribution. So that led me to what if I could use hypothesis on my own site? What if I could use that as a commenting layer? Is that a tool or a network that I can start to accumulate around my writing of close reading? Especially when I left this hypothesis close reading on a friend's blog, he naturally wanted to come back and do it to me. So there was that kind of how can I encourage that or motivate that? Should I put hypothesis on my blog natively? I tried that on and off over the years. And there were some frustrations that I had in particular with using hypothesis on my site. And so I wrote this post in February, I think it is, that led me to here. So thanks for the people that read it and anyone that's probably people in the room who left hypothesis notes on this as well. So thank you for those people who are here. And you can go and read this and explore it in more detail. But the crux of it was me, just as an average punter, not being a UX expert, not knowing the hypothesis roadmap or resources or priorities, but just looking at how this works for me and what I like and dislike. This is a hypothesis experience, particularly on mobile. So this is things that you're probably mostly familiar with. This is the genius web annotation. And particularly on mobile, there's a few things that I really like about this, in particular for UX purposes. One of them is, if I can use this little pointer, you guys can see this. Yeah, so one is putting the annotation button, unlinking it from the selected text, is actually a really nice feature on mobile because there are other things that pop up when you select text, especially on Android, which I'm more familiar with. So I really like the idea that this goes at the bottom of the page, it's kind of anchored. It gives a nice, clear user flow. Obviously, they only have one annotate button. There's no highlight button or Notion ingenious, I don't think. So that's something that I really like about Genius. And the second thing is that this X button goes inside the window pane, which is not really a big deal on desktop, but on mobile in particular. If we go back to the previous slide, this hypothesis button here, you can see that it's actually on top of my name, which is also the link to the homepage of my site. And so closing the window often was also a link back to the homepage of my site. So that's a really frustrating experience on mobile. So putting the X inside the window just kind of neatly sidesteps that. So that was kind of one observation that I had, and one thing that I liked. And then this is the Google Docs kind of comment Notion. So not a second annotation, but comment Notion on mobile, which actually many people are not familiar with because most of the commenting on Google Docs happens on desktop. But there's a few things, again, that I really like here. In particular, this idea that comments don't appear from the side, they appear at the bottom. So there is a kind of a fixed height window that basically takes up half the screen on the bottom. Then if there are many comments, scrolls vertically. And the one thing that I really like about this is that you can see the text at the same time. So that's the thing that we kind of take for granted on desktop with hypothesis where you annotate the text and the slider comes in. But for the most part, you can still see what you're talking about. On mobile, that's not true. You can see this on hypothesis kind of completely covers the screen. Pros and cons to all these options. I'm not saying any of them are perfect. But that was kind of the layer of the land that I mapped out. And in the process of writing that and the process of exploring hypothesis a bit more closely for my blog, I settled on this, which is, forgive me, I'm not a developer, so I'm sure this can be written better and I'm sure John, I'm sure cringe or hopefully just improve the code that I have. But I now have this running on every blog page on my website, and what it does is this. So this is the, see over here, this is the kind of default out-of-the-box hypothesis experience on mobile. And this is the kind of slightly cleaned up version. And there are two things to note. One is that I've hidden the window by default. So especially on mobile, it's a slightly less intrusive experience. It doesn't get in the way of the content if there are no annotations out already. So it kind of gets out of the way a bit more. But the annotations themselves are still highlighted in yellow. So you can still click those and expand the sidebar. The button for the sidebar is pushed down. So this is the, I think this is the clean theme. Forgive me if I'm wrong, John, or anyone else. But that just means that it's less likely to interfere with an on-page element, which is nice. Gets around some of those things a little bit. And then the background I turned to white just for kind of aesthetic personal preferences. And this now runs on every page on my site. So feel free to go in and do this by default. We don't need the Chrome extension. Hopefully gives a slightly broader footprint to this. So people that don't know what hypothesis is and don't know what annotations are can still come to my site, see the yellow text, click it, and discover this whole workflow. It's not ideal, not perfect. But I'm starting to get to a point where I'm feeling like, oh, this is a thing that I can have on my site and leave on my site and might solve some of my issues. This is kind of a slight side note. But one thing that I wanted to call out in observation is this is the LA Times. And this is a kind of a pretty high-profile usage of annotation on a news publication where they were using an annotation tool so that they didn't have to define cultural terms in the article. We're doing this because we want the people who already understand those terms to feel like a target audience. Really great, feel-good kind of usage of annotation and a really respectful idea behind different audiences and different perspectives on the web. And it uses Genius. And I think this is instructive for a few reasons, especially where newsrooms and media organizations are entirely mobile-first at this point, almost mobile-only to a certain degree. And there's no reason this couldn't be in hypothesis except that I think the Genius experience looks a little nicer except for this Powered by Genius thing, which is ridiculous. I don't know why they have it in there. But that's by the by. So I'm going pretty quickly, trying to fit everything in, sorry, for the ramble. So the blog ecosystem, so there's a deeper idea here around why annotations are important and why I like them in the first place. And I've had several conversations over the past couple days about the idea that regular people and the social web already understands annotations relatively well. This is a tweet, but is also essentially an annotation. This is somebody taking a screenshot and highlighting a section of a web page and commenting on it, adding perspective or adding just some kind of reaction. And that this is a very kind of well understood and comfortable medium for people. This is not an edge case. This is not a power user feature. This is something that I see in my Twitter feed all the time. And so there's definitely appetite and demand for this kind of activity, which is interesting. And some of the side channels I've had over the past couple days or even this afternoon was around respecting the idea that actually incentives are important to adoption of a certain technology and that playing nicer with Twitter, whatever that means in the Twitter ecosystem, making it easier or more frictionless to get in and out of the Twitter experience and hypothesis experience could be interesting for more adoption and more social awareness within the tool. And that threading as a kind of broader concept is a thing that is getting more and more traction. I think that when Twitter's UI changed to kind of make threaded tweets a more kind of natural embedded use case of the product, it became a thing that people's mental model fits well to. They understand the concept of linking multiple things together and publishing in that way, in that workflow. And that threading is now, at least again in the small corner of the web that I hang out in, starting to expand a little bit. This is a blog post that Aaron Z Lewis, who I don't actually know personally, but I really like this blog post which lays out some of the different ways that threading is happening today across blogs and Twitter and some other areas, in particular looking at kind of some of the super power users of threading and how they use it and so on. And I think this is really interesting because you could copy and paste, find and replace threading with annotating in this blog post relatively easily and most things will still make sense or still be relevant and interesting. This is, so Twitter is one area where I see quote unquote annotating already happening within my peer group, my social network. Arena is another one. Hands up who's familiar with Arena? Anyone's familiar with Arena? One, one person I think in the room. So Arena is interesting and worth paying attention to. It's where my peer group goes for knowledge creation and connecting knowledge together. It's a research platform is what they call itself. It's kind of a rudimentary social network. It's a rudimentary bookmark tool, some combination of all of those things, but allows you to grab things from the web and to put them into groups and categories to collaborate on those things. It has some notion of a quote excerpt feature. So not an annotation tool per se, but this is really interesting also because one of the reasons this is widely adopted is because they have a kind of a brand and a clear cultural position about the kinds of knowledge that they're interested in and so on. And so they're not agnostic to those things, which I think is interesting and instructive in terms of building community and building adoption in various tools. Being a tinkerer and a blogger, I'm relatively uncomfortable with Arena myself, partly because I feel like their business model is built on a house of cards and so I don't believe they're gonna be around for a long time. So I built my own Wiki on my own website, which tells you a little bit about who I am. And as well as building a Wiki, I also have a kind of an idiosyncratic perspective on blogging itself. And I wrote this blog post called Small B Blogging about how I think about blogging and what blogging does for me. And one of the things that is important out of all of this is building close reading, building a smaller but more engaged network of interesting and interested people around the writing and the publishing that I do. And this was kind of the beginnings of where annotations also was bubbling in my head, I wrote this last year. And ever since then I've been chipping away at this idea of how do I do Small B Blogging, which is about building small networks, building people that are gonna closely read my work rather than trying to spread to the masses and get as many clicks and page views as I can. And there's a particular framework in there. So this is a framework called Release, Reference and Rework by a blogger called Venkatash Rao who runs a blog called Ribbon Farm, hands up who knows Ribbon Farm for people. Great, so that's a whole bunch of new Ribbon Farm readers potentially. He is a little bit off the deep end with some of his blogging, but I really love this framework in a blog called The Calculus of Grit about basically how to know whether you're on the right track with building your own kind of cultural system and building your own network and building up a body of writing over time. And his theory is all about this three R framework of release often so published regularly. Reference or reference your own work, go back and when you have an idea, lead the trails back to the previous versions of that idea and the thread in the chain and then rework, so take it, don't be afraid to keep refining the ideas you have even once you hit publish, you can hit publish again or you can go back and edit a piece. And this idea in particular of referencing and reworking is a thing that strikes me that annotation and hypothesis is really great at. This idea of linking documents together, of keeping documents alive after they've been published. And so again, this idea of hypothesis and annotations is bubbling through. And then this is another great blog post that I read from a guy called Matthias who I don't know personally again, but I'm not gonna read the whole quote, but he basically said, if we can make the conscious decision to find better ways to connect our personal sites and enable more social interaction again, what we would end up with is not only a bunch of personal websites but a whole interconnected personal website verse. And this aligns very well with the kind of indie web movement that many of you will be familiar with and comfortable with. But again, I see hypothesis as being a potential tool in this personal website verse, this idea of linking these sites, the disparate sites together and ideas and people. And so I have hypothesis on my site today. Any blog post has it by default with that code that I showed earlier. I would love aspirationally to go one step further and actually remove discuss from my site. So discuss is a kind of a third party of the commenting system that any site can put in with a little bit of JavaScript. They have a really great UX, but unfortunately are a problematic business that they stuff a whole bunch of tracking cookies into the JavaScript. They also inject ads. Occasionally this is an ad that injects it on my website at one point, which I will leave you to understand whether that fits with my aesthetic or not. But, and this was just last night, I just put discuss into Twitter and grabbed a couple of just random, completely random tweets about discuss. So to emphasize the idea, there is a pent up frustration with them. They got acquired by an ad tech company one or two years ago, which I think is part of their demise, but there isn't really a good alternative. And in particular, commenting is a social contract of you need to be able to trust the commenting platform and recognize the commenting platform in order to use it. So when I'm on somebody else's site, if they have a commenting platform that I don't look, don't recognize or understand, I'm far less likely to use it. And that's what the value of discuss is that everyone recognizes it and quote unquote trusts it, at least as far as I know how to use it, I know where my comments are gonna go, I have an account, et cetera. And so, you know, much as I would love commenting to be solved by a thousand different solutions, actually there is a value in having a well recognized and well understood solution. And so one of the experiments that I wanna try next is actually getting rid of discuss comments on my site and replacing that bottom of the page comments experience with some kind of page notes from Hypothesis API call, which I haven't done yet, but have aspirations to at least experiment with and play with. Well, this brings me to, so I stole this from somebody's presentation, I forget their name, apologies. But this was kind of the, from yesterday, with the mental model of how Hypothesis kind of works in the different layers that are available. And I'd love to propose a new layer. Somewhere in between the idea of a group and the general public, so we're talking about public comments, public annotations, but that still, there is still some value in having some kind of light ownership or light oversight and management of Hypothesis annotations. And today, I actually learned yesterday there is such a thing as a publisher group or a publisher level that I didn't know about previously, which maybe solves some of the things that I'm about to talk about, but I would love for that to be available and for this to be a thing that bloggers can sign up for or engage with to the point where I can say, I want to know when people are leaving annotations on my work, I want a way to maybe moderate them, have some kind of experience around them, report on them, et cetera. And so in part of my quest, an interest in doing this, one of the biggest pieces that is missing is an alert system. There's no way that I know of today to get an alert when somebody leaves an annotation on my site, so I built one. So this code is, again, I told you I'm not a developer, this code runs inside of a Google spreadsheet using a thing called Google Scripts, which is one of the coding platforms that I'm most familiar with, which I guess says a little bit about who I am. And basically, this relies on a single API call here to a wildcard domain search, pulls back the latest annotations, if there are new annotations and it sends you an email. One of the great things about the way that this is built is that you can copy and paste this into your own Google spreadsheet and run your own version of this, and it sends using your email address to yourself. So there's no third party. By the time you copy and paste this code, it doesn't rely on me in any way, shape, or form. Also, it doesn't rely on any other mail server, which requires management and costs and oversight or anything, so this is a good kind of, I think, indie, small version of what people might need. This is an example of what it looks like, so you can see that this is a Google spreadsheet on the left that shows just the list of annotations that it's fetched in recently. And on the right is an email that I got yesterday from some annotations on my site. Is XLDRKP here right now? No, don't know who they are, but they left some annotations on my site and we had a little back and forth. So yeah, and so I have this set up now, which I feel like it's starting to round out this, using annotation as a layer, as a blogger, to both encourage them in the first place and then monitor and get alerted for them on the back end, assigned to feel like a bit of an end-to-end workflow. And I just wrote up this morning, so it's not very detailed, but this blog post here has a link to all of this code and everything. The presentation has it as well, but the blog post is there for you. And if you have any trouble setting it up or anything, then, or don't know how to use Google scripts, which are super easy to use, honestly, anyone can use them. Just give me a shout or send me a note or grab me after here. And that's kind of it. One last note, just maybe, especially given the spider web logo for the conferences, this is also one of my latest blog posts about a new mental model for blogging that I'm really excited to explore and I haven't really explored it yet, but suffice to say, watch this space for blog punk. That's all I got. Oh, Klon, here we are at the end, the very end of our day. Any questions? Oh, yeah, lining up. He's already asked a bunch. You can go ahead first. This is just for hypothesis, actually, but it's out of this. What will it take, technologically and or socially, for you to be the Disgust Box with a little H in the corner? Full stop. That's all I have. You can answer it tomorrow at the hack day. So Disgust is a growing nightmare, right? You have page notes. That's Disgust with a Q, you mean, right? Yeah, that nasty thing. And if you put a T on it, then it makes sense. Yeah, so just the box, hypothesis branded, makes a page note and discussions happen over there. Otherwise it looks just like it's not just like. Oh, the H key is not working. Sorry. Like Friday. Right, yeah, exactly. All right, I could. Is that what you're saying? All right. This is the Disgust Box right here for those that aren't familiar with it. It's just a piece of JavaScript that gets called in. Yeah. Why is my picture on there? Because it's logged in, I presume, with... It's not my... Not my computer, sorry. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The editing's that bad. So the experiment that I want to have is displaying the page notes from hypothesis at the bottom of the page in a nice kind of format that looks something like this. But I don't think my coding skills are good enough to have the little start the Disgust Box that will post a page note when you leave the comment. I don't have the skills for that, so. Yeah. So we think a lot about annotations as, you know, like marginal notes, but you talked a lot about annotations as links and building threads. One of the things that's difficult for me is when you find something, you're like, oh yeah, I want to link this to the other stuff that I wrote or this thing that somebody else wrote is finding that other thing. And then like, do you go say something back at that other site and link it back to the first one? Like, do you have a conceptual workflow or is that just something that needs to be worked on or? I mean, I have this wiki on my own site that I maintain with just like links of stuff and random notes, which is a conceptual model that I have for grabbing things and putting them in containers. I actually don't think there is, it's one of the reasons I think that everyone uses to-do apps and goes through many of them, is not because the to-do apps suck, but because everyone's mental model of to-dos is different. And so they need to find a thing that matches their workflow. And I think it's the same for archiving information, creating knowledge, making notes. I think everyone has a slightly different mental model for it. One thing I did see, which maybe is interesting, is there has been research done, totally blanking on the name that I can send you after, but I think it came out of MIT, but it was about how people use digital tools to store and remember things, so collecting and archiving things, and that files and folders is the best way to do it. Yeah, I've heard the same. Yeah, they're better than tags. So people think the tags are good, but when you actually put it to test and sit people down and ask them to remember something or find something they previously have left, that files and folders outperforms. And so that's why my wiki is quote unquote, files and folders, these are the folders, these are the files, because it allows me to, I can just about remember this number of folders in my head, but the tagging structure becomes unruly, it's far harder to memorize, and every time I see this, I'm reinforcing in my brain what this list is, whereas that's also not true for tagging in many ways. So anyway, just one observation maybe that don't be afraid to use files and folders for collecting things. I am that person who has a comment rather than a question. If you go back to your blog post where you talk about experimenting with annotation, Rob and I annotated it at almost exactly the same time, where we point to a way to have an icon to indicate that a page can be annotated and there are annotations on it. And the example that I showed is actually not hypothesis branded, although it would be cool if people felt inclined to do that. And then the other thing was... Not sure why, isn't showing the annotations on the page. I think it may be like your most recent blog post. Yeah, but this one should. And the annotations on that page like from extension install. The other blog post, the integrating annotations. Yes. Oh, okay. This one. That one. But I don't know why annotations are not showing up. Next to your browser bar, there's a little number in number four, maybe click there in that. But the JavaScript on my page should show these anyway. The annotation I made at least was toward the bottom. Yeah, just not showing for some reason. Something weird is going on. Anyway. Oh wait. Oh, here we are, here we are. So I have a screenshot of how someone else has done it. It's just, it says annotations, brutal bubble. And if you click on that, it opens the sidebar. It's not hypothesis branded at all. And then Rob actually linked to it a gist that shows how it could be done. That's maybe. This one mentioned thing, no. No, no, no. We're back to the room. Up further down. No, no, no, no. Sorry. And I scroll down that. Yeah, this one? No. Oh, this one? There we go. So what is this doing? This is the, oh, this is the button that opens there. Okay, cool, cool, cool. And then the other thing is if you or anybody else wants a publisher group, which is that default layer where you would have moderation privileges, and then you would also have an activity page where annotations would aggregate. Just email support at hypothesis, that is me, and we'll let you set up. Amazing, thank you. This might be the same question or comment. I was wondering, at one point in the working group, or in discussions around the working group, we had talked about the notion that a person should be able to be the curator of annotations on their page, or not necessarily the curator, but you would have a view of annotations that look things like ones that you've surfaced up from you should be able to be notified that there's been an annotation on your page, and you should be able to surface up other ones to become like premier content that you actually incorporate them in. And I don't know, has that gone anywhere with hypothesis? Can you, could I register my blog with hypothesis, a site that I own? Like I can register for Google Analytics. I can register my site and say I own this. I put a little thing on there that proves that I own it. And then go ahead. The answer is, the answer is, that's a thing we should totally do, but it doesn't exist yet. So there's no way for someone to say, I am to basically prove that they are the owner of a particular page. And therefore, I mean, the line we've normally usually taken is that if you own a page, you should be able to control the default view that people see. So for example, like instead of the public layer showing up, you might have a different layer that's one you control. That's typically we found the thing that publishers really care about is that it's OK to have the public layer there somehow, or if you're logged in, or for someone who's logged in to use their own private groups. But what they really care about is like, what's the thing that people see by default if they're logged out? But I mean, if people contact Caitlin, then we can set something up for sites on a basis. But then we obviously we have to establish via some of them. That's right. OK, great. Sorry for not involving in that conversation. I would only land a plus one and say, yes, like a little. There's lots of other tools that work that way with a little meta tag or something that proves that I own it and then that validation. Cool. Thank you.