Wouldn't you love to leave a comment on this site?

Where We Are Today

Skewed as it is towards the western, wealthy, and white, the internet is the best proxy we have for the world in which we live. Every government has a website, every large corporation, every international clothing store or fast food chain, every nation-wide newspaper, every major NGO, every pharmaceutical company. These organizations - through commerce, charity, or force - govern our world. They govern us. Shouldn't we have the right to publicly comment on them?

In many countries, we do have the right to publicly comment, but they never hear us, and not many other people do either. We whine to our co-workers and friends about this or that ridiculous policy, complain to our friends about the malfeasance of this or that corporation. Sometimes we even sign an online petition to save Darfur, save the environment, oppose a piece of legislation. But we don't know if our voices are really heard. Those who govern our world are so far away, so self-isolated. How can our opinions about them be as clear to the world and the marketing slogans they create to promote themselves? The secret is on the internet.

How Rating and Review Works

The idea of "user rating and review" is no longer foreign to most internet users. We rate products on Amazon. We rate movies on IMDB. Even blog comments are a form of rating and review. We review a product or an idea then we rate it: excellent, average, or horrible.

But until now, what we were able to rate and review was completely at the mercy of the website. Amazon wants us to rate and review their products, so they put a rating and review feature on their site and IMDB does likewise. But does the White House want us to rate and review Bush's last speech? Nope. You'll find no comment feature on whitehouse.gov. Does Pfizer want you to rate its policy for testing AIDS drugs? Looks like they didn't put a comments section on their homepage either.

There are some currently-available methods for commenting on websites. Del.icio.us allows users to tag a website with any word they want. Del.icio.us then creates webpages that bring together all the websites tagged with a certain word. For example, if you tagged Whitehouse.gov with the word "reckless," then that page would appear in a list on the del.icio.us page for the tag "reckless." The problem with del.icio.us is that you must go to the del.icio.us site to see the tags and that del.icio.us is not used by the public at large. If you tag the web using del.icio.us you audience will be limited.

How to Leave a Comment on Any Site

But this need not be the case. It is possible to comment on a webpage and for the comment to appear on the page itself so others can see it. (Warning: some technical jargon follows)

What I have in mind is a browser add-on (very easy in Firefox) so that a banner would appear at the top of webpages displaying comments made about that page. This banner would not be part of the script of the page, but would rather be part of the browser. When a person visited a webpage, they could choose to leave a comment by clicking a link on the browser's toolbar, similar to the way del.icio.us users can tag a page. That person's comment would then be linked to the URL, so the next person with the add-on (let's call it Rayt) would be able to see the previous person's comment, like this:

How I imagine the Rayt banner would look on a webpage

If you were a Rayt member, you would see the comments of other Rayt members in your web browser whenever you visited a URL with a comment linked to it. The possibilities are endless: commenting on the Iraq war on the White House site, commenting on obesity and diabetes on MacDonalds site, commenting on blood diamonds on the De Beers site.

And these organizations would have to listen, because when people visited their sites they wouldn't see just the company's message - a sparkling logo, a press release. Above that site visitors would see the people's message - showing the organization's dirt laundry for all to see. The organizations couldn't control or block these comments, because the comments would not be a part of their site, but rather part of the browsers of millions of individuals and the Rayt servers.

Nuts and Bolts

Here's some nitty-gritty about how it would work: Each partial comment diplayed on the banner would be a link. If you clicked on the link a pop-up would appear that you give you access to the whole comment and also an opportunity to rate the comment or mark it as spam. This would move good comments to the front of the banner, the bad ones to the back, and delete the spam. You could also use the rating system to limit the comments you saw. You could choose to display all comments or just the comments that are highly rated.

The program would exist in different languages (different Firefox add-ons to download). The commenting would be anonymous to protect say, someone who wanted to comment on a government website in China, but the comment rating system would prevent anonymous spamming.

I imagine that it would work something like Wikipedia. Rayting websites would become a hobby and people would add comments to important websites as a public service (like writing about blood diamonds on the De Beers).

The Up-Shot

In short, Rayt would make the entire web a free speech zone, where governments and corporations would have no more power over their public image than ordinary citizens.