Comments on the Side

In an announcement in September, Google revived a controversy that had been lying dormant for almost a decade. With Google's new Sidewiki service, any Tom, Dick or Harry (or Teresa, Deidre, or Helen), can post their comments about a company, right there on the company's Web site. Well, not exactly on top of the site, but close enough.

Insert Your Comment Here

Sidewiki is a component of the latest Google Toolbar, a toolbar that can be added, in a matter of seconds, to Internet Explorer and Firefox browsers. (If you want to follow along, go to http://toolbar.google.com and install the toolbar into your browser.) As Google-toolbar users browsed the Web over the last few weeks, they will have noticed a new icon appearing in the top-left corner of many Web sites, a blue box with angle brackets (>>) inside; click this, and a wide sidebar opens, showing information about the page you are viewing. This information may have been fed into the sidebar by Google, which for some sites places blog entries that it has found relating to that page, for instance. But the sidebar may also include comments written by visitors to the page. Sidewiki users may also see cartoon-speech bubbles on the side of the Web page, indicating that there's a comment related to that section of the page in the sidebar (users can highlight an area of the page in order to associate the comment with that area ' click on the entry and the browser will highlight the area of the page to which the comment is related).

So how can you create a comment? Click the Sidewiki button on the Google toolbar, or the Write an entry link inside the sidebar itself. You can provide a title, and hundreds of words to the body of the posting. You can even embed a YouTube video if you wish.

This is not a new concept. Perhaps the best known of the early Web-site commenting tools was Third Voice, a company that began offering a similar Web-annotation system 10 years ago, but closed its doors early in 2001 after running out of money. Third Voice wasn't alone, though: there was JotBot, CritSuite, Gooey, ComMentor and Xanadu, for instance, and today there's Diigo, AddaTweet and Kutano. There are also similarities with Stumbleupon. But the major difference between these systems and Sidewiki is reach. These other systems are little-known services that someone has to seek out and join ' and a comment posted on a Web site is invisible to the vast majority of visitors. Third Voice, for instance, reportedly had a couple of hundred thousand users by the time it expired, and let's face it, how many people reading this article have ever heard of Diigo, AddaTweet or Kutano? And as for Stumbleupon, they have around 8.5 million users, still a drop in the ocean compared with Google.

As far as reach goes, Sidewiki is in a league of its own. Google won't say how many people use the Google toolbar, but after all, this is Google. It's definitely in the tens of millions, probably in the hundreds of millions. This is not a small community able to post and view comments, it's a significant part of the population. Furthermore, any Sidewiki user can e-mail, Twitter or Facebook a Sidewiki comment, and the recipient, Google-toolbar user or not, will be able to see the Web page with the comment on one side. A quick search will reveal simple tools that allow non-Google toolbar users to view Sidewiki comments directly.

Conversation or Trespassing?

So what's the problem with Sidewiki? Well, many would say there is no problem; this is all part of the social-networking revolution, free speech, part of the “conversation” of the Internet. Anyone should be able to comment on anything. It's rather like someone holding a placard outside your store; as long as they are on the public sidewalk and not trespassing on your property, you have no right to silence their speech.

On the other hand, let me paraphrase a Web-site owner from a decade ago, during the debate about Third Voice: “What [Sidewiki] does is take the conversation about a [W]eb site and/or the people behind it and attach it to the [W]eb site.” In effect, the argument goes, people holding the conversation are now trespassing on your property. (Counterpoint: A Web browser is the user's property, not the property of the site being viewed in the browser.) We all know the propensity of many people, hiding behind the assumed anonymity of their Internet connection, to be obnoxious, abusive or worse. It's easier to comment negatively from your desk at home than to physically stand in front of the store and/or people with whom you are angry. As one participant in an online discussion about Sidewiki recently stated: “You give people a voice and they'll quickly prove they don't deserve it.”

Soon after Third Voice launched, an opposition movement ' Say No to TV ' arose, made up of around 400 irate Web-site owners angry at the idea that they were losing control of their sites; that visitors to their sites might see criticism rather than just the company line, that what visitors saw was no longer in the hands of the site owner alone, but could also be posted by disgruntled employees, unhappy customers, people following some kind of personal vendetta, and so on. Imagine an unscrupulous competitor posting derogatory comments on every product page in an online store, for instance.

Google is quick to point out that it wants the Sidewiki sidebar to contain “added perspectives,” “insights,” and “helpful information,” not diatribe. It has developed new tools to do this; to filter out obscenity, abuse and poorly written posts, and to favor well-written, useful information. Nonetheless, this is all an automated process, and thus not 100% reliable. (I posted a garbage message via Sidewiki on a Google page a couple of hours ago, and it's still there.) What these tools might teach people is that if you want to libel someone using Sidewiki, you must do so eloquently.

Is Sidewiki Legal?

There are definitely two sides to this argument. I can see how a service such as Sidewiki could provide useful information layered on top of the Web site a user is viewing ' the Web in general and Google specifically, is, after all, an information service. On the other hand, I can understand the concern of even the most ethical companies; you don't have to do anything wrong on the Internet to become the target of abuse. From a legal standpoint, though, it remains to be seen where Sidewiki and services like it sit within the framework of the Communications Decency Act (“CDA”).

Imagine for a moment that disgruntled Employee A libels Employer X through Sidewiki. Section 230 of the CDA states that: “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.” Is Google protected under this section? Note that the CDA is 13 years old, passed at a very different stage in the life of the Internet (even before Third Voice). An “interactive computer service” was a very different thing in those days, and it's quite possible that the representatives who introduced this section envisioned something quite different from Sidewiki. In fact, the year before the CDA passed, the New York Supreme Court ruled that online service providers could be held liable for the speech of their members in some cases (see, Stratton Oakmont, Inc. v. Prodigy Services Co.), and '230 sought to provide more protection to such providers. But Prodigy Services hosted bulletin boards, something quite distinct from a Sidewiki-type service.

Let's look at another hypothetical. Say you're a service provider hosting bulletin boards. Members come to your site to join the conversation. In most cases they even have to register or even set up an account to do so. No one can comment without registering, and although it may be possible to read messages without commenting, it's still not possible to simply stumble across the messages ' you must go to the Web site to read them. You, as service provider, host that conversation, and '230 protects you from blame for the comments of your members.

How does this compare with Sidewiki? In order to make a comment you must sign up for a Google account; in order to read the comments, though, you don't need an account. Similar so far. But you don't need to do much to read those comments; merely a single click on a little button. Google is not simply hosting a conversation on a Web site that belongs to it, but spreading the conversation across the Web, taking the conversation “and attaching it to the [W]eb site.” In fact it could be argued that although two pages are displayed ' the Web site and the Sidewiki comments ' only one actual Web site appears in the browser at that moment; that strictly speaking the comments are not part of a Web site at all, they are merely displayed inside a “widget” attached to someone else's Web site.

Site Owner Options

In the meantime, what can a site owner do to deal with Sidewiki? Well, it is possible to block Sidewiki. For instance, Sidewiki won't allow commenting on SSL “secure” pages (the type used in e-commerce checkout processes), so it would be possible for a site owner to SSL protect the entire site (though this would be a drastic step for a number of technical reasons). There are also scripts that reportedly block the posting of comments; not the viewing, just the posting, but of course if nobody's posting there's nothing to view.

On the other hand, many site owners are embracing Sidewiki. Google has provided a way for the site owner to take the top comment in the sidebar, and smart site owners are also recruiting people to write positive Sidewiki comments about their site, hoping to push other comments down the bar.