(2012-10-05) Annotations Hypothesis Vs Rapgenius

Dan Whaley of HypothesIs hopes that Rap Genius' $15M won’t go into another closed Annotation System. When we began to explore this ourselves, and began to realize just how many others had come before us, we assembled a spreadsheet of over 50 past and present efforts–beginning with the godfathers, Third Voice and U Tok, and including many well-intentioned projects since then, such as Reframe It and Google’s own, ill-fated SideWiki project. It was our analysis of these projects and a year of research and interviews with many of their founders and key individuals that led us to the conclusion that the only way forward was with an open source, open standards and fundamentally non-profit (though financially sustainable) approach. In conceiving Hypothes.is, we articulated a set of 12 principles to reflect this.