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Genius Beta - Annotate the Internet

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Me 9 days ago here on Product Hunt: "Imagine a decentralised Genius.com where you can annotate and share any piece of content you come across." 😂 –
hahaha that's awesome, this could work wonders for schools and across education
YOUR comment was actually what inspired this! thanks dogg
Congrats on the launch, and . As most people I think know, you started as Rap Genius, a community and site for annotating lyrics. Now you're building a platform to annotate the web. Was this the plan from the beginning and honestly why do we need to annotate the web?
Maker
Thanks! This definitely wasn't the plan from the beginning. But we were always obsessed with the notion of web annotation, primarily in the form of our love affair with Google Reader. I know Google Reader nostalgia has reached a Tickle me Elmo level of meme, but still.. it was a great product! And what made it so great was you could say what you wanted to say about the EXACT PART OF THING that was funny or weird or whatever. We were so obsessed we built a Google Reader clone called reader2000.com (which you can use and it's pretty cool!) Anyway, how cool would Google Reader be if, in addition to a feed, it followed you around the Internet and you could always see what your friends / famous people were saying about stuff?
Can you imagine what PH will looks like once Genius comments will start to pop all over the place :)
I really like your ( and ) enthusiasm in this AMA! Makes me excited to use Genius more. Congrats!
This is really sweet. Nicely done. How are you guys thinking about annotations that are layered on pages that are changing across time? Are annotations linked to a specific page at a specific point in time?
Tom spoke about this at the Code Genius event in February in Brooklyn -
Nice. Thanks much.
When google added lyrics to the top page results of search how did ya'll react? I imagine lyrics seo was a big part of your customer acquisition strategy even though your product is vastly different in experience to reading plain lyrics on googles page. How are you going about promoting your different verticals now? Are lyrics something that just took a hit but similar strategies are working elsewhere?
Maker
We take a long view of this stuff. We're trying to build a indispensable resource about songs (we like to think of it as a "museum of songs"), which means having accurate and well-formatted lyrics but also annotations from fans and artists, information on the song/production as a whole, etc. We believe that in 100 years when you're listening to a song, you'll be experiencing some information that grew out of the Genius product and community The Google thing is funny. If you search, for example, for "eminem my name is lyrics," you get the Google onebox result before the Genius result. But if you click into the Genius result, you get the whole backstory on the song from Eminem himself, as well as a bunch of great annotations from the community. We would obviously like to be the default first result for every query for which our pages are the best result. But we're not sweating it too much: the arc of SERP ranking is long and it bends toward justice!
This is....genius I do think Point is onto something similar but it's after more of a closed network whereas I see this as being WAY more open (and better)
1. What's the best way to ensure quality annotation? 2. How can you build an early community of power annotators similar to the Wikipedia and Quora communities?
and first, awesome Twitter handles. 😄 If you plan is to annotate the web, then you need users of all types to be able to easily and quickly get to annotating. What's your plan to make this as easy as possible? Why do you have the friction of signing up before you get to test and play and prove the value of annotating the web in the first place?
Maker
Thanks! I keep trying to get Ilan to change his to something equally funny but more legible, but, you know, "Ilaners gonna Ilan"..
I think this is an awesome execution of an idea that has long been needed. While there are many ways this can and will evolve, I look forward to seeing the community adding value to complex or nuanced writings with equally thoughtful annotation and insight. Congratulations!
Congrats on the launch! Do you plan on allowing users to make annotations private to a selection of friends/colleagues?
giving that option would defeat the purpose of the whole thing...
or give it another entirely new purpose :) ok...i guess that means no
I don't think it necessarily would. Some pages are going to get totally swamped by annotations that are... let's just say... not so genius ;) It would be nice therefore to be able to share and follow specific ones.
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