Workshop on WWW and Collaborative Work

Wayne Gramlich, Sun Microsystems

During the summer of 1994, I decided to take a stab at implementing an annotation service called `Public Annotations'. The results of this work can be found at: http://playground.sun.com/~gramlich/1994/annote/index.html

A link to this work can be found on the collaboration page at the W3C web site: http://www.w3.org/hypertext/WWW/Collaboration/Overview.html

This public annotation system is both a functioning collaboration system and a failure in that nobody uses it. The purpose of my presentation is to delve into the causes of the failure and present a follow on system that overcomes most of the problems with the first system.

The primary problems with `Public Annotations' are:

The successes of `Public annotations' are: