I’ve now added over 100 annotations using Hypothes.is (h.), almost all within the last month. This includes a few non-public ones. Two weeks ago I wrote down some early impressions, to which I’m now adding some additional observations.
- 100 annotations (in a month) don’t seem like a lot to me, if h. is a regular tool in one’s browsing habit. H. says they have 1 million users, that have made 40 million annotations to over 2 million articles (their API returns 2.187.262 results as I write this). H. has been in existence for a decade. These numbers average out to 20 annotations to 2 articles per user. This to me suggests that the mode is 1 annotation to 1 article by a user and then silence. My 100 annotations spread out over 30 articles, accumulated over a handful of weeks is then already well above average, even though I am a new and beginning user. My introduction to h. was through Chris Aldrich, whose stream of annotations I follow daily with interest. He recently passed 10.000 annotations! That’s 100 times as many as mine, and apparently also an outlier to the h. team itself: they sent him a congratulatory package. H.’s marketing director has 1348 public annotations over almost 6 years, its founder 1200 in a decade. Remi Kalir, co-author of the (readworthy!) Annotation book, has 800 in six years. That does not seem that much from what I would expect to be power users. My blogging friend Heinz has some 750 annotations in three years. Fellow IndieWeb netizen Maya some 1800 in a year and a half. Those last two numbers, even if they differ by a factor 5 or so in average annotations/month, feel like what I’d expect as a regular range for routine users.
- The book Annotation I mentioned makes a lot of social annotation, where distributed conversations result beyond the core interaction of an annotator with an author through an original text. Such social annotation requires sharing. H. provides that sharing functionality and positions itself explicitly as a social tool ("Annotate the web, with anyone, anywhere" "Engage your students with social annotation"). The numbers above show that such social interaction around an annotated text within h. will be very rare in the public facing part of h., in the closed (safer) surroundings of classroom use interaction might be much more prominent. Users like me, or Heinz, Maya and Chris whom I named/linked above, will then be motivated by something else than the social aspects of h. If and when such interaction does happen (as it tends to do if you mutually follow eachothers annotations) it is a pleasant addition, not h.’s central benefit.
- What is odd to me is that when you do indeed engage into social interaction on h., that interaction cannot be found through the web interface of my annotations. Once I comment, it disappears out of sight, unless I remember what I reacted to and go back to that annotation by another user directly, to find my comment underneath. It does show up in the RSS feed of my annotations, and my Hypothes.is-to-Obsidian plugin also captures them through the API. Just not in the web interface.
- Despite the social nature of h., discovery is very difficult. Purposefully ‘finding the others’ is mostly impossible. This is both an effect of the web-interface functionality, as well as I suspect because of the relatively sparse network of users (see observation 1). There’s no direct way of connecting or searching for users. The social object is the annotation, and you need to find others only through annotations you encounter. I’ve searched for tags and terms I am interested in, but those do not surface regular users easily. I’ve collated a list of a dozen currently active or somewhat active annotators, and half a dozen who used to be or are sporadically active. I also added annotations of my own blogposts to my blog, and I actively follow (through an RSS feed) any new annotation of my blogposts. If you use h., I’d be interested to hear about it.
- Annotations are the first step of getting useful insights into my notes. This makes it a prerequisite to be able to capture annotations in my note making tool Obsidian, otherwise Hypothes.is is just another silo you’re wasting time on. Luckily h. isn’t meant as a silo and has an API. Using the API and the Hypothes.is-to-Obsidian plugin all my annotations are available to me locally. However, what I do locally with those notes does not get reflected back to h., meaning that you can’t really work through annotations locally until you’ve annotated an entire article or paper in the browser, otherwise sync issues may occur. I also find that having the individual annotations (including the annotated text, in one file), not the full text (the stuff I didn’t annotate), feels impractical at times as it cuts away a lot of context. It’s easily retrievable by visiting the url now, but maybe not over time (so I save web archive links too as an annotation). I also grab a local markdown copy of full articles if they are of higher interest to me. Using h. in the browser creates another inbox in this regard (having to return to a thing to finish annotation or for context), and I obviously don’t need more inboxes to keep track of.
- In response to not saving entire articles in my notes environment, I have started marking online articles I haven’t annotated yet at least with a note that contains the motivation and first associations I normally save with a full article. This is in the same spot as where I add a web archive link, as page note. I’ve tried that in recent days and that seems to work well. That way I do have a general note in my local system that contains the motivation for looking in more detail at an article.
- The API also supports sending annotations and updates to h. from e.g. my local system. Would this be potentially better for my workflow? Firefox and the h. add-on don’t always work flawlessly, not all docs can be opened, or the form stops working until I restart Firefox. This too points in the direction of annotating locally and sending annotations to h. for sharing through the API. Is there anyone already doing this? Built their own client, or using h. ‘headless’? Is there anyone who runs their own h. instance locally? If I could send things through the API, that might also include the Kindle highlights I pull in to my local system.
- In the same category of integrating h. into my pkm workflows, falls the interaction between h. and Zotero, especially now that Zotero has its own storage of annotations of PDFs in my library. It might be of interest to be able to share those annotations, for a more complete overview of what I’m annotating. Either directly from Zotero, or by way of my notes in Obsidian (Zotero annotatins end up there in the end)
- These first 100 annotations I made in the browser, using an add-on. Annotating in the browser takes some getting used to, as I try to get myself out of my browser more usually. I don’t always fully realise I can return to an article for later annotation. Any time the sense I have to finish annotating an article surfaces, that is friction I can do without. Apart from that, it is a pleasant experience to annotate like this. And that pleasure is key to keep annotating. Being able to better integrate my h. use with Obsidian and Zotero would likely increase the pleasure of doing it.
- Another path of integration to think about is sharing annotated links from h. to my blog or the other way around. I blog links with a general annotation at times (example). These bloggable links I could grab from h. where I bookmark things in similar ways (example), usually to annotate further later on. I notice myself thinking I should do both, but unless I could do that simultaneously I won’t do such a thing twice.
What I intend to do and why
I’ve been using h. in the past weeks, and I like the tool. It created/uses a W3C protocol and has an API I can use with a token connected to my account.
I want to integrate annotations I make with my notes I keep locally better. This points towards using h. ‘headless’ in the sense I push things to and pull things from the API, rather than do my annotations in browser. This would reduce friction in my note making flow.
There are several things I can think of, at different levels of difficulty to achieve.
Being able to submit urls with a page wide annotation, tied to how I save webpages and a motivation for saving with a markdown clipper.
Being able to annotate a page saved in my notes, and send the annotations to the right url in h.
Being able to update annotations.
The first is the most straightforward, and the first I will try to achieve.
Steps taken
Save new page annotations
Envisioned path:
Use markdownload to save a page in markdown in an Obsidian folder. Alter the template to have the relevant info in a predictable spot (h post status, URL, web archive url and motivation for saving)
Run a script that checks for new files in that folder and filters those with a status of not yet posted to h.
Run API calls to submit the selected notes to h.
Change the status of the notes in Obsidian to published to h.
Steps taken
Explored the minimal JSON structure to submit a page annotation.
Had a look at a PHP wrapper for h. API on GitHub to see what’s usable
Steps to take
Try out the minimal JSON / POST structure in Postman to get it right
Try out the same JSON / POST re-using an earlier micropub script to post from PHP to h.
Find out how to evaluate the response and then set the status in the Obsidian note, re-using the script I use to blog from my notes to WP.
Look, I’m mentioned!
We are neighbors!
I started my blogroll by copying Ton’s, so I could be fairly be called an imitator in place of neighbor – but I like that it captures the placefulness of a loose internet community.
Many, many, many of my blog posts start their life as annotations that I then cut down or expand – as this one! I find that this helps me make a habit of annotation; you make the best use of the tool that’s most in your hand.
Anyway, go read Ton’s post. It made me cheerful enough about annotation and hypothes.is in particular that I also made something to share: a bookmarklet to open the hypothes.is sidebar in dark mode. Even rendered less visually obtrusive, I haven’t decided whether I want to have hypothes.is open on all my pages by default, as the agora does. I’d love to hear others’ opinions about it.
10 Thoughts After 100 Annotations in Hypothes.is – Interdependent Thoughts zylstra.org/blog/2022/09/1… annotated via.hypothes.is/https://www.zy…
thank you Peter!
Today at 14:07 twenty years ago, I posted my first blog post. Well over 3000 posts later, this blog has been an integral part of quite a stretch of my life, to the point where it is unavoidable that if you’ve read along you now probably know more about me than I think I’ve actually shared in writing.
In the past few years I’ve taken this blog’s anniversary as a moment to reflect on some of my blogging practices. That yearly reflection started 5 years ago when I was just leaving Facebook. This time it coincides with #twittermigration, where many people are exploring federated options now that Musk has taken over Twitter. Whether that is something that will stick is uncertain of course, but it is interesting to watch playing out. Other earlier such reflections: 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021.
Last year I wrote:
Indeed, that is exactly what I did from early this year: ensure that I could post directly to this blog in different ways. The key to that was create a Micropub client, which posts to this site. Once I had that I could create different paths to feed a post to that Micropub client. From inside a feedreader, directly from my notes in Obsidian, or through a simple web form. More recently I created different versions of that web form, to also post check-ins, and announce travel plans. In all fairness, my habits in how I post things haven’t fundamentally changed yet: I’m writing this in the WordPress back-end. But increasingly I am using those other paths to get content into this site.
Making it easier to post, puts the friction of blogging where it needs to be: wanting to write something.
Connecting things up into flows, blurring the lines between my site, online interaction and my notes for instance, stays an interesting thing to experiment with. In the past months I started using Hypothes.is more intensively, to annotate things I read on the web. Already all those annotations seamlessly end up in my local notes, from where I can work with them, and where they concern my own site I’ve made them visible here.
But most of all, aside from all the more nerdy things of tweaking this site and my information flows, this blog has been a source of conversation for twenty years now. It was my original hope, and my ongoing motivation to keep blogging.
Which brings me back to the earlier mentioned #twittermigration. Musk declared the bird is freed, but it seems quite a few people think the bird was caught and rather take wing on their own. Quite a few of those are the people I early on conversed with through their blogs too. If there’s a key difference between ActivityPub/Mastodon and Twitter, it’s that the federated version only ‘works’ if you actually interact with other people. Likes don’t matter in highlighting a message. Boosts do only share a message with your own followers, and has no other effect. It doesn’t mean it will be put higher in the timeline of others, it’s all in the now. There’s no amplification. Conversation is the key, if you interact then others may also see it and join the conversation. Twitter used to be like that too.
Conversation is key, and that is why I blog.
Here’s to another year of blogging and conversation.
Photo by Patrick Perkins on Unsplash
Many folks who have been hanging around on the IndieWeb scene may already be familiar with hypothes.is, a web annotation tool that allows you to highlight and make notes on web pages and PDFs directly, in-browser. Historically I’ve had accidental interactions with it when I’d loaded up blogs (like Tom Zylstra’s for example) and I’ve also seen Chris Aldrich wax lyrical about the service a lot (he is a hypothes.is power user, and he’s made so many annotations there that they recently sent him a little care package in celebration).
I about a week ago I decided to give it a try and here are some of my early thoughts about the service. So far I have made 35 annotations – not as many as Chris A above but enough to get a feel for the tool. Below are some thoughts and early experiences.
Why I Like Hypothes.is
The thing that’s really appealing about the service is that you can just install the Chrome Plugin or Unofficial Firefox Plugin and just start annotating whatever you’re looking at. Using it is as satisfying as taking a paper printout of an academic paper and going to town with my fountain pen and the results are a lot more legible and leaves a public learning exhaust for others to examine. I find using the hypothes.is annotator is lower friction than using the Joplin or Evernote web clippers to make copies of documents and skulking off to add markdown highlights and comments in your own private note repo and I prefer to write in public anyway, it helps me hold myself accountable. Plus the tool works on PDFs without the need for a separate PDF reader.
The other cool thing about hypothes.is is the social aspect: if you make public comments then other people who land on the same page as you and open the annotation tool can see what you wrote and even respond to you. This can be a really cool way to interact and learn together (although I can totally see how people might end up getting into flame wars too – with great annotation power comes great responsibility guys).
Owning Your Annotations
Hypothes.is is run as a non-profit and public annotations are licensed under creative commons zero (public domain) meaning that there’s no need to worry about data ownership (unless you really want to retain copyright over your comments for some reason). However, I was initially concerned that Hypothes.is, like other “tech silos” might just disappear or go offline and take my data with it.
After reading around a bit it seems like I wasn’t the only one that had this concern.
As Tom Zylstra says:
Some people have annotations sent to their private knowledge store in tools like obsidian. Whilst another common pattern seems to be to use tools like IFTTT to automatically syndicate annotations back to your personal website. I’ve adopted the latter approach. I’ve built a tiny tool called hypopub which runs every 15 minutes, polling my h rss feed and posting any new annotations it finds to my micropub endpoint. You can find a list of all of my public annotations on my blog here. I’ve removed the annotation post type from my ‘firehose’ RSS feed because I don’t want to annoy people if I make a bunch of notes. You can still subscribe to my annotations feed separately if you wish.
What can you annotate?
It seems like you can annotate pretty much anything. So far I’ve successfully annotated PDFs – both locally on my laptop and hosted and a variety of web pages.
Some websites do not load in hypothes.is’ via proxy but usually you can still use the browser plugin or bookmarklet to get things working.
You can annotate pages in webarchive and I have found that you can also annotate pages in your own archivebox. The only problem with doing the latter is that it can be very lonely. Hypthes.is is a social annotation tool so if you only ever annotate articles in your own web archive you’re unlikely to find anyone to talk to. Having said that, if you download and annotate a publically available PDF I am told that the system will attempt to fingerprint it so that others who have downloaded the same PDF can see your public comments. This hasn’t happened to me yet though – maybe because of the niche AI/NLP papers I read.
What Next?
I’m enjoying the service so far. I’m planning to continue to use it to generate literature notes that will form the seeds for pages in my digital garden. I’ll also be looking for ways to combine it with annotations I’ve made in other systems e.g. my kindle clippings and wallabag reader annotations.
I’m also really interested in how others are using the service. If you have a cool hypothes.is workflow please do get in touch (or even annotate this page!).