What I propose here is not deeply original; most of the ideas presented have existed for a long time as research prototypes. However, these tools have not had very widespread diffusion. That is not strictly accurate: some aspects of my proposal are inspired by tools that have become very popular, like web forums, blogs and wikis.
The aim of this comparison section is to
- Identify why I believe that existing, popular tools cannot be used to achieve the stated goals in their current form
- Learn from existing projects the best ideas to go beyond what the popular tools offer
- Try to understand what slowed the adoption of some of those ideas
Some of the difficulties in adoption of the research ideas will turn out to have been technical; those will be seen to be less of an obstacle with modern web technologies. Other difficulties I would call socio-structural; the distributed nature of the web works against any approach that makes content dependent on a centralized server, for example. (Though such services can certainly enhance content.) Other difficulties are political and cultural: content ownership issues, for example.