Google Sidewiki

Google just introduced a new enhanced feature for the Google Toolbar called Sidewiki.  The tool allows users to add comments and links to any webpage.  So, if the page you’re looking at mentions a topic, but doesn’t have a hyperlink to more information you can add a link that other Sidewiki users will see.  Sidewiki also automatically posts entries from related webpages in the Sidewiki panel to provide readers more information.  This could be a very useful feature for extending information and content.

From Google’s perspective it’s likely a strategy to harness human collaboration to identify relevant sources of additional information and potential related webpages, which will help improve their pagerank and search algorithms.   Also, it could be used as an in-browser advertising panel and a haven for spammers, which will be very annoying for users.  It would be nice if you could install Sidewiki without the full Google toolbar plug-in, and I find it interesting that Sidewiki only works with Firefox and IE through the Google toolbar and can’t yet be installed in Google’s own Chrome web browser.

From the Google.com/sidewiki page if you access it with Chrome – “Sidewiki is currently a feature in Google Toolbar (in Internet Explorer and Firefox), but when Google Chrome supports extensions, we will work on building it for Google Chrome, too.”