Let’s Hear from the Peanut Gallery
Many of us would cringe at the notion of anybody being able to publicly comment on our work. Well, start cringing, because Google has made it possible.
The Google SideWiki allows anybody to post a comment on any page or portion of a page on the Internet (you have to download and enable the Google Toolbar). Google suggests they’ll screen out spam and less valuable comments by rank ordering them, kind of like they do on their search pages. Since it just launched this week, there’s not a lot of evidence of how effective that will be.
Andrew Keen blogged in a less than flattering fashion about the latest from Google, and he earned a number of SideWiki comments. The meatier comments definitely make it to the top with entries labeled “less useful” by Google appearing on a second page.
We haven’t been able to find any comments posted on a hospital or health system site yet, but if you find some, please share it with us. We did find comments on the CDC site on preventing heart disease (example: The information presented here is useful but incomplete). If people will comment on something as basic and non-controversial as that, one can only imagine what they might say about pages on your Web site.
We often broach the subject of allowing user comments on hospital or health system Web pages, and the concept is usually met with a furrowed brow, at best. One can only imagine how the industry will deal with SideWiki.
Our best advice right now is to watch and see. Try it out yourself, and that will allow you to see if anybody is commenting on the pages on your site. It may fade as so many interesting pieces of technology tend to do, or it might add a whole new set of content on your site.