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:
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
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!).