This is pretty interesting. So, personal story: * About a year and a half ago, I thought about getting into this field. I built http://lederboard.com http://le

This is pretty interesting. So, personal story: * About a year and a half ago, I thought about getting into this field. I built http://lederboard.com http://lederboard.com as a result - it works pretty well, actually (plenty of bugs behind the curtain) but the idea was to try and open it up as a standard. * If I do pick lederboard up again, I will likely convert it to use this open standard. * My goal was always to have the 'features' of lederboard not be in the annotations themselves, but in the moderator controls, the ability to follow sites and specific users, etc., and to basically act like reddit-enhancement-suite for an internet-wide commenting system. * However, I realized this was a truly tremendous mountain to climb. Like, crazily huge. So I wound up going in a different direction. In any event, I think that the guys at Genius should take note of this and consider it very seriously. They raised a whole lot of money and, as far as I can tell, this is a direct shot across their bow and it has the backing of W3C, which is huge. I am pretty happy I didn't wind up in the middle of that fight. Though maybe I might get back into at some point. In the meantime, I am focusing on easy-to-use encryption: http://gibber.it http://gibber.it . I think that is probably a little more important right now. For background, I am a practicing attorney with a pretty substantial practice in software, startups, corporate finance and information law.