OK – have you heard of sidewikis?  No, well I hadn’t until a couple of days ago either.  The bottom line is that if you have downloaded the latest Google Toolbar you are able to leave a sidewiki entry (and also read the entries of other people) on ANY page on the Internet (where the ‘owner’ of the page has NO control).

I won’t go through all the details but Phil Baumann has written an excellent article on it here.  In the post he covers some very interesting points.  I just left a comment on his blog that makes me sound a bit like I have social media phobia (which I do not :+)).  It read…

This is a really excellent article on sidewikis – I’ve been googling away trying to get a good understanding for the last few days and there was this post just sitting there in my reader! You have summed everything up brilliantly. My concern is that there is no notification function to inform you that a sidewiki has been left on a page. If you are running a huge website then how can you keep track of this? Especially since if this is meant to encourage engagement then you wouldn’t know if the comment is there whether or not it is a bitch-slap or a compliment. I love to engage – it is just that now we have to check every page of our blogs / websites that we run in order to do it!!!

Do you get my point – you are literally going to have to hunt down people’s sidewiki comments (oh boy).

This aside it really is an interesting development.  If someone is dissatisfied with a person, an association or a company they can literally put a comment (as long as it follows Google’s policy) that can be seen by anyone on that page.  Crazy world hey!

The challenging thing though is that people could easily publish inaccurate information – this is a bit worrying in settings where what people write could have a serious impact, say for example in the area of healthcare (in which I work)…  Someone could post an ill informed or inaccurate entry with medical advice that another person might act upon.  This could have potentially fatal outcomes.  Eekk.

…I am not a big techie nerd so I’m not sure how this will evolve – maybe it will remain in the world of the geeks and will pass us by (although my gut says this won’t happen – remember when you didn’t use RSS functionality?  OK YOU still might not but millions of other people out there do and it has changed the way they sift through information on the web.

Anywho folk in the meantime if you have a blog or website I reckon you should have a little read up, download the toolbar, keep an eye out and prepare to engage…

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