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I was amazed to find a new toolbar at the bottom of my IE browser today. I use it fairly irregularly, probably that's why I did not discover it earlier. (Or maybe Widows automagically installed it just a couple of hours ago).

About Web discussions

The Web Discussions feature enables users to attach comments to a Web page or any document that can be opened with a browser (such as .xls, .doc, .ppt, .gif files, and so on) so that the comments appear with the document but are stored on a discussion server.

The discussions are threaded. Users reviewing your Web page can use the Web Discussions toolbar to view and reply to any discussion. You can then review discussions and incorporate changes to your Web page based on the feedback you receive.

Discuss a whole page or a paragraph

You can discuss the whole page, using general discussions, or insert comments in a particular part of a page, using inline discussions.

Maybe it is something new for Microsoft, but in fact it is the same thing as the Annotea W3C Project.

Annotea is a good project, but what was said earlier still holds true:

[Annotea] Web Annotations

The idea for shared web annotations is a good thing, but I do not see that it has moved much forward. Main problem is that the use of Annotea is not widespread. As Jamie Pitts says: "While I have always had great hopes for web annotation, it is plagued by the classic chicken-egg problem. Getting the success feedback loop going involves building communities with web annotation."

I wonder how the web annotation world will change with the introduction of MS Web Discussions. Hmmm, also interesting how is this implemented by Microsoft. RDF?

Related: Approach to Categorising Information