Sharing your opinion

Internet can be used to do a lot of different things. Playing online games (I told about this in one of my previous blogs), sending e-mails and sharing information and opinions. Sharing your opinion is a big part of the internet. There are a lot of ways to do this. You can use the old fashioned forum, add information to a Wikipedia site, use social network sites like twitter and facebook to give your opinion or express your opinion about an online article on the website. Unfortunately not all websites offer the possibility to express your opinion. When something is missing, some new tool will be invented, namely: Google Sidewiki.

What’s Google Sidewiki?
Google sidewiki is part of the Google tool bar, which can be downloaded on www.google.com/sidewiki . If you have downloaded the tool bar, a panel will appear on the left side of the website you are visiting. You can click on the link ‘Read this article’ (Artikelen lezen). Then a list with reactions of website visitors is shown.

Possibilities

To use this tool you must have a Google-account. This gives you the opportunity to read the reactions of visitors, or indicate your appreciation to the given comment too. Experience of other users of Google Wiki show that it takes a while before your comment will appear.
An advantage, which is a disadvantage too, is the absence of a moderator. Normally on a website or forum there is one person responsible to check the comments to prevent inappropriate reactions to appear. The possibility to use sidewiki takes a risk for website (shop) owners. Negative publicity can easily be added and can have a negative influence on your website (shop). Google knows this problem too and has add the option ‘misbruik melden’ (report abuse) to the tool bar. To read comments written in different languages an option on the google tool bar can be selected. Of course there is a possibility to share your comment by e-mail, facebook or via twitter.

I am really curious how many people will use this tool. Will it only be used by critical readers, who like to express their opinion? Or will it be used by the majority of the website visitors? We will have to wait and see…