Techdirt points to an effort by Slate’s Paul Boutin to Make Website Annotation Cool Again. As Techdirt points out, this idea — where surfers can add their comments to websites so that others who use the same annotation software can view them, and add their own comments — is not new. (The semi-official term is Web Annotation.)
I went back through my old columns and saw that it was exactly five years ago that I wrote about ThirdVoice, which (according to c2) stopped offering its service, in part because of complaints, a year later.
Others were uTok, Instant Rendezvous and Gooey, all of which seem to no longer be operating.