Google has just released a plug-in for the FireFox and Internet Explorer browsers called SideWiki.  For those of you that are not familiar with the term wiki, it refers to a system in which a community creates the content and comments etc. An example of a Wiki would be Wikipedia.

Anyway, back to the original point, SideWiki allows anyone with the plug-in to make comments about any site that they visit. These comments would then be visible to anyone else who visits the site with the SideWiki plug-in installed.

Some are saying that this is a great idea others are not so sure. If you are one of the ones thinking its not a good idea. You may be saying “If I wanted visitors to leave comments I would have made a forum or blog etc.”

The commenting may be out of your control but think of the positive. It could give you insight into your site and how to improve it. Download the plug-in yourself so you can see the comments.  If you are getting negative comments about a certain area or feature of your site you can work to change that area to make it more appealing. They may even leave comments relating to how it can be better.

The other side of the coin is that you can see what areas of the website people are leaving positive comments about. So you could turn it into a positive in which it could act as free user testing if enough people are commenting.

Tags: comments, google, plug-in, SideWiki

This entry was posted on Friday, September 25th, 2009 at 11:20 am and is filed under Business, Web Design and Development, web content. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.