Mary -

Your idea (Rayt) has really stuck with me and I've been discussing it with friends and even brought it up @ AspirationTech's latest eAdvocacy conference!

What I found out:

A group tried to create a similar model akin to Rayt's in the late 90s. A Wired article from 2001 summarizes it pretty well:

"In 1999... launched Third Voice, a free browser plug-in that allowed Web surfers to annotate any site with their comments. The idea was to spark 'inline discussions' among Web users, promoting a new civic mindedness that would keep corporations, government and the media honest."

From some googl-ing I did (searching "third" + "voice") I found out that there was a bunch of spam that got injected into the system but that the development team was considering "exploring the use of peer ratings (which would allow users to filter notes based on the author's reputation)"

Apparently, though, these peer ratings never got a chance to come to fruition. Third Voice discontinued its service in early 2001.

This was largely a result of a poor revenue model. The advertisement model, which drives much of the innovation we're seeing today, didn't seem to cut it for the Third Voice folks.

It's also important to realize that it was a couple years ahead of its time. Transparency didn't go over well with many webmasters back in the day. Plus I don't think there was the online culture shift towards collaboration and user-driven reviews which is evident from the obvious successes of Wikipedia and Amazon. Two political scientists from the University of Ohio speculated in 2000 that Third Voice was "unlikely to amount to much because they require initiative on the part of users...[The web] has become a mass medium used mostly by relatively passive consumers, and as such major content providers will dominate it." Not only did these two political scientists ironically public their original article on the web, but I bet they've since changed their mind with the explosion of the blogosphere.

Imagine if Third Voice got a second go-round right now, though? That's what really excites me about Rayt. We actually have a working model of what was largely a success. So it's less about bringing vaporware to life as much as it is about bringing back to life realware whose time has finally come. With some changes, of course.

It would definitely need a way to sift out the spam as well as to encourage debate and fact-referencing over extreme opinions that aren't grounded.

In addition to the commenting feature, perhaps there could be a wiki-like feature - wherein people could collaborate on creating an overlay of the website in question. Imagine if people could leave notes on the site itself - critiquing certain statistics or highlighting the small print for example. Kind of like this amazing counter-advertisement of a Blue Cross ad: http://www.sickofbluecross.com/assets/uploads/blue_cross_ad1.jpg

I wonder if this could be successfully collaborated on by an online community. I imagine there would be constant revisions and the overlay would be in unpredictable flux. The original webmaster might also try to remove controversial stuff that was posted by the community. Perhaps if the changes themselves could be voted on, it would require that same number of votes to remove them. I'm still thinking about how this would work...

I see Rayt as being an open-source project - something created by the online community for the online community. I also see it structured as less of another web 2.0 project and more of a social change experiment. I think the reason that all of these ways to mark up the web haven't fallen under our radar is because they're not built to change the world. Rayt would have to be built with that in mind in order for it to have its intended maximum impact.

I'd totally like to be kept in the loop as you continue to explore this great idea...

--Joe

PS - You can view Third Voice's old page here.