As you know it costs money to promote a website. To get on the front page of a Google search you’re either doing PPC or you have excellent original content and plenty of quality incoming links. PPC and time promoting a website is money.

Now let’s say my competitor doesn’t do PPC and they don’t spend the time educating their customers like I do. Their cost of doing business is less than mine. Because of this they can afford to sell the same products for less money. All they would need to do is go to my website and post a comment that they found a another site with the same great service and better prices.

In other words my competition is using traffic that I paid for, to promote their websites that has little or no traffic.

It would be the same with a brick and mortar business. Suppose my competitor that sells the same products that I do and spends nothing on advertising. Plus he doesn’t have a good location or signs so no one can find him.

If I’m spending a million dollars a year promoting my business and have a prime location on Main St, would I allow my competitor to set up a table at my front door?

I hope that Google will remove Sidewiki as a feature. Consumers might like it, but I think it opens Google up to lawsuits in the event the feature becomes popular.

I cant stop people writing malicious comments about my business in forums and I dont even try – but this would not be a very effective way for a competitor to attack me – however the side-wiki represents “in your face, default commentary” as long as the user has it turned on and the decision to turn wiki on or off is unlikely to be taken on a site by site basis. This is making it TOO EASY to attack.

Sometimes there should be a little effort involved – the person who wants to write negative comments should have to do a little work to find a suitable forum – ther person who wants to investigate a company and sample negative oopinions should have to dig a little – you can make information TOO accessible, TOO easy to get at – no discipline, no thought – just in your face mindless accessibility – thats a direct invitation to abuse.

Free speech is not the issue here – we dont allow Graffiti in public places but that does not mean that free speech is suspended. There are appropriate places to write comment and there are inappropriate ones – there are better methods for dealing with scams and any benefits are not justified by the sheer scope for abuse.

As a business owner I hate this.
Malicious comments from competitors could appear adjacent to my webpages. Fair enough to comment on forums but this visually is tantamount to an invasion of my webspace real estate. No difference between this and if Google enabled users to hack into my website and alter content directly. Hell of a difference between forum comments posted on sites elsewhere and uninvited comment that appears right next to the website. Hope someone sues the ass off Google they deserve it for this one – at the least website owners should be able to opt out

Romance Lover

The comments systems and blogs work because every webmaster, blogger or sys admin is moderating on a regular basis the comments. I cannot imagine how Google will moderate the work that millons of people do each and every day on their blogs and systems.

Unless they have some sort to automated system it will impossible. Even those can be broken and this is why spam still exists and why people can sign up with fake gmail accounts as well.

The solution would rest in the site owner and if Google decides on this approach then it will gain the power back to the site owner which is not the idea they have with SideWiki. I think they are hoping in some type of reputation system like Wikipedia but this completely different, people normally work with each other to help them selfs and thats why also Wikipedia doesn’t have ads.

Nobody has the time to moderate other websites if you are already on the top with your own, so unless people do this it will lead to a major chaos. Even so Wikipedia is not such a democracy as people think, there is a back end control. Not a single free for all system works in the world because it leads to anarchy. So unless Google controls this SideWiki comments it will be a major spam database, and millions of craps of bits and bytes of 0 useful information.

It was released some months ago and even websites which are huge and very popular dont have a single comment on it. Why does Google want to take content away from users servers to their own servers is just a mystery they know.

There are severals ways this will and can be killed. Kill SideWiki, a major boycott from Internet users will probably start very soon, currently not even major sites have comments, so nobody cares yet.

For example, I see allot of companies are now using SSL as their main site, even when you go the main website it redirects you to a secure connection. This is to what the web will lead if companies, Google included try to pulls this thing off. Every website will be encrypted as some soft of private sites that will render this system useless.

Another way is to add a .htaccess file to disable Google bar users. How about the new Chrome plugin SideWiki? Well you can even redirect Chrome users to another page that says its not supported if you detect Chrome as user agent. Dont worry because Google will have to retract for this and I know how they will do it. They will proceed with what webmasters are asking, they will add an option for site owners that dont want it to have enable it on their sites to disable it.

If they dont, you can block Chrome users, you can block Google bar users, it will redirect them to a page that tells them to uninstall it. All this can be done with basic knowledge. You can SSL your website, there are several ways this can be done. And this can have a major impact on Google services.

Its not enough for Google to own all the data on the websites, now they want to take away the conversation to their servers. Remember the Google slogan “Dont be evil?” Google is by far the most evil company that ever existed. They are even buying network carriers so they own the cables where the bits and bytes travel.

They claim this will allow to comment on websites that dont allow it currently, this is truth and its excellent for the user type reputation systems, but if that was an honest and true statement, why dont they just allow it on websites without comments systems or better, to disable it for websites that already have a system in place. This mostly lies from the Mountain View company as they researched and even tried to hire staff from a company called Reframe It which is the real SiteWiki.

Many sights with important political information have cut comments to keep the masses from correcting the true state of the nation and letting others know that the story is erroneous.

It has become my belief that many people no longer know what the 1st amendment is of the US constitution that we feel everyone, right or wrong is entitled to.

If you as me, sidewiki is near patriotic for free speech.

Not here, but who wants to sign up to post just to receive spam or be moderated by a scum bag who doesn’t believe your valid point matter. If you have a negative agenda, I see your point.
If you are for the 1st ammendment, please keep your comments open and support sidewiki. Just ask for them to not start censoring it.

PS, this is a double post (sidewiki)