Ton expresses his concerns about annotations in any online tool (the example is Hypothes.is) being potentially risky, if nothing else as a consumer of learning time that isn’t well integrated with his other notes:
The type of interaction and annotation I have/do with a source text I normally do locally. Unless it can be a PESOS (Post Elsewhere Syndicate to Own Site) flow, exchanging that current value of processing things locally for merely the potential for interaction and conversation is likely a bad trade-off for my learning.
I completely agree, especially when it comes to the decision to start using yet another annotation tool.
Although I do have some page annotations in Diigo, as much as anything that’s because the tool is already there, in my browser.
Aside from the risk that your work is sitting in someone else’s domain (the raison d’etre of Indieweb!), as I develop my understanding of what I need to do for effective sense-making, the more I have realised that simple annotations sitting isolated from my main notes are almost as useless as bookmarks which are never looked at, and a far worse return on my time.
Hence the motivation to build a tool to bring them in to my flow.
