Meeting notice:

2-17-98 7:30 NE43-773 (545 Tech Sq.)

Suggested topic:  Those of you have been following the
interests of Drexler and associates know that for ~the
last twenty years they have been deeply interested in a
system that would allow on-the-fly annotations of (in
contemporary terms) web pages.

Such a system has always been presented as a way for
smart people to correct the mistakes made by stupid
people, rather than, as seems more likely, given the
relative population sizes, a tool with which stupid
people could spread goop over the productions of smart
people.

Anyway, recently they rolled out a demo.  So much time
and effort has gone into this cause over the past few
decades that we probably owe the new system an
evaluation.  It is called CritSuite and can be reviewed
at http://crit.org.  You will note a little slot up at
the top of the page. Enter some URL there -- feel free
to use mine if you like* -- click 'Go', wait for the URL
to be retrieved, click 'change,' and fill out the form.

I think the concept is that your comments and their
location in the text are stored in the CritSuite
server. The next time you or anyone types that URL
into the locator field the server fetches the page,
fetches the location of your comments from the CS
server, attaches icons at that location, and serves the
page.  If you then click on the icons the comments are
served as well.  I myself wasn't able to make this
happen.  Maybe others will have better luck.

Still, the concept is clear enough.  What do you think?
Is this a good idea?  Is it at any rate an OK idea?
Should we set up a larger test, perhaps by commenting
on each other's websites or running the CritSuite
software on a local server?  (The CritSuite server
seems chronically overburdened.)

*I tried to use Microsoft's -- I had lots of comments
to embed in that site -- but for some reason it
didn't work at all.


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hapgood@pobox.com