A lot of us Web folks were surprised to hear about Google’s new Sidewiki service last week, which Google announced from their blog on Wednesday, September 23. Sidewiki is a universal commenting service that allows users to associate additional information or commentary with any webpage, thus expanding the “social” aspect of the Web exponentially. Although this service certainly opens up many possibilities for open commentary on websites (Google touts medical applications — doctors commenting on health sites, for example), a method of annotating the entire Web, the announcement was also greeted with a lot of skepticism about Sidewiki’s usefulness and longevity, and a lot of handwringing about its implications for opening new spamming channels and opportunities for competitors to badmouth each other on their websites, and accusations of Google being Evil.

Google has taken a number of precautions to assuage the above-mentioned worries:

1. If you have a Google account and profile, your comments have a better chance of being published. And the longer you’ve had the account, the better;
2. Your comments will be scanned for inappropriate language;
3. Your commenting history will be taken into account, in terms of the priority given your comment or if it’s displayed at all.

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