okay so we did genius.com, time to chillax, right? WRONG! now it's time to take a deep dive into the CORE of this whole genius meme: ANNOTATIONZZ. #backtothebasics

this is still EARLY STAGE, so we want LOTS OF FEEDBACK. what's wack? what's confusing? show me love..

anyway, here’s what we’re thinking2 types of annotationstoday we have 2 types of annotations: “community annotations” and “verified annotations”. the community annotation is where you do the sort of “best interpretation of what’s going on”, and then the verified annotations are where you (if you’re allowed to make verified annotations on a particular page), can say YOUR OWN interpretation / tell an insider-y story or whatever.

the overall idea here is staying the same, but we’re making some changes to how it works.“community annotation” branding and attributionthe community annotation doesn’t have amazing branding right now – the name “community annotation” doesn’t even show up unless there’s a verified annotation present, and then even when it does it looks bland / wack.

furthermore, the name “community annotation” is a bit confusing because it describes how the annotation comes about (via community editing) versus what the annotation is intended to BE (the “best” / “most interesting” interpretation as #certified by the genius editorial board).

finally, you have to click “authors” to even see who wrote it / that it’s collaboratively-edited, etc.

so our thought here is to REBRAND this sucker to the “genius annotation” (tho maybe that’s a corny / ambiguous name; i’m open to suggestions), and make the attribution super clear:



pretty, no?what about that bottom row of “action buttons”? what can you DO to these “genius annotations”?so first of all you can “upvote” and “share” (clicking “share” opens a meme that lets you pyong / fb / tweet it), “upvote” should probably prompt you to share the thing as well, you get the idea.

also “upvote” replaces “cosign” and you’ll see at the top of the community annotation when someone famous (or someone you follow) has upvoted the thing. #simplicity

“edit” is an interesting one – EVERYONE CAN EDIT. that’s right, we’re going full-on WIKIPEDIA. this is a bit of an aspiration / we’ve gotta build the monitoring tools to make sure this goes okay, but if you want to capture the world’s knowledge you need to let the whole world edit. stay tuned.

“needs improving” (name up for debate) is an interesting one – the idea here is basically “downvote with note”. you click this and then you get a little selector of what’s wrong with the annotation. like you know “it’s just rephrasing the line”, “the grammar is bad”, “citation needed”, “useless pic”, “missing such and such important info”, etc. you also get a textbox where you can write whatever you want. ideally logged out users should be able to do this as well.

and finally there’s this little “talk” button, which is actually a pretty juicy little meme..the talk pageclick the “talk” button and the BOOM, the TALK PAGE sexily slideessss over!



the talk page is a zone dedicated to discussing / improving the annotation. gone are the days where if you wanted to have a convo about an annotation you’d have to do it in a weirdo long-ass thread below the annotation or in the forum!

here’s what shows up in the talk page:edits of the annotation“needs improving” with their notes (this basically replaces suggestions – you can “resolve” them or “accept” them or something to make them go away)commentsbasically it’s like there’s a forum thread on PCP for every annotation. no more “discuss this annotation in the forum” – it all happens right on the annotation!

and these talk pages should behave like forum threads in other ways as well – e.g., it’s weird that we send a ton of email for forum posts, but never when someone comments on your annotation! that’s the most important type of convo and it’s a second-class citizen. we must fix

okay so that’s it for changes to what’s now known as “community annotations”. now for…changes to what we now know as “verified annotations”since time immemorial we've had this question of “what is a verified annotation and who can do them and where?” the original thought was “it’s ‘verified’ because it’s from the author of the words!” but this collapsed pretty soon because fuck, i want to see what chance the rapper has to say about “turn on the lights” just as much as i want to know his thoughts about his own lyrics!

and this is even more complicated in the lit / news worlds where experts / scholars really want to make comments “AS THEM”, and not in the context of this community annotation thing. so we’ve done a mish mash of this and have hacked around it by featuring people on texts they had nothing to do with just to allow them to make verified annotations. not great

now we want to fix this one and for all by answering the question of “who can make verified annotations and under what circumstances” with “ANYONE CAN ADD ‘VERIFIED ANNOTATIONS’ TO ANY LINE WHOAAAA”. so now i finally have a place to say “this is the line that first got me into cam’ron!” etc.“personal annotations”here’s how it works – anyone can add their own annotation to any line (i’ve been calling these “personal annotations”, but that’s not a great name lol!):
under normal circumstances these annotations will appear BELOW the genius annotation (QUESTION: will these look too much like replies to the genius annotation? probably argh!) and they’ll only be visible to people who follow you.

however, SOME of these “personal annotations” will be “pinned” ABOVE the genius annotation. obvious examples are “personal annotations” from the artist, or someone truly truly famous (obama), but if the audio engineer on the track leaves a note, editors will have the ability to “pin it” and boom it’s on the top. here’s how this might look:




note that these “personal annotations” are collapsed by default – you have to expand them to see more than 2 lines of text. this keeps the “genius annotation” central.ok so are we turning into twitter here or what?“personal annotations” from an artist are one thing, but who cares about personal annotations from some random person? this isn’t fucking twitter – the goal isn’t to get people on genius saying whatever they want, the goal is to get them to contribute to this wiki-style guide to human culture! won’t these personal annotations distract from this goal?

point taken! this whole meme is dece twitter-y.. but i think it’s still good. why? because i believe “personal annotations”, tho they don’t directly serve the wall of history will indirectly do so by getting the discussion popping and out of the discussion good ideas will emerge.

this is not so different from the forum / chat – i was always nervous those would distract from our main mission, but they ended up enhancing it. you’ve gotta get some chaos in there!

BUT: the end goal is to create an amazing knowledge project. personal annotations (and everything else) exist purely to serve this end. (ps you’re not gonna earn much IQ for personal annotations)what about discussing / replying to a “personal annotation”?I’M GLAD YOU ASKED!

personal annotations also have a dedicated “forum thread-type thing-y” just like genius annotations. however, this isn’t a full-fledged “talk page” because the only thing you can do to a personal annotation is “reply” (you can’t say “this needs improvement” or edit it). here’s how this might look:

so there you have it!the future of annotations. thoughts? does “genius annotation” make sense as a brand? does the design look nice? will “personal annotations” be good? or is it too confusing to be able to do TWO THINGS? e.g., here’s what might show up when you highlight a line in this new world:
is this just too confusing? counterpoint: this is basically what verified artists experience today! if it’s too confusing then we’ve gotta kill verified annotations too, no?

anyway, something. hit me with feedback bong bong!!