Part of the goal of making it a standard, and one in particular where annotation clients could listen to multiple annotation service providers, is precisely to avoid "Annotation Central". Our client does not currently operate this way, but our intention is to move that direction this year. Many underlying architectural changes are being made now to support that change.
Okay, to make this proposal work in practice initially, we do need some annotation service provider(s).
Who is both (a) eager to be one and do the integration before there is a market/large community and (b) is trustworthy enough to be included by default in the largest likely annotation clients such as the major web browsers?
To state the obvious-- Hypothesis is eager, and is running one. If we can be so bold, we think we are also trustworthy. We knew that this could not work unless we also created a service.
Certainly if browsers integrate annotation natively, it would increase the discoverability of conversation considerably which is of course the point.
I personally think if that is done it should require the user to purposely choose an annotation service as well. The actual act of inviting the conversation to pages should involve a user choice.
See further thoughts on the question of page owner consent-to-be-annotated in another of my replies above.
In terms of controlling for trolls/spam, etc annotation service providers will need to use the same combination of automatic filtering and editorial or community moderation that are relied on widely elsewhere. The success of any individual service will presumably at least partly depend on how good of a job they do.
Ultimately annotation is something that readers choose to enable by adding to their browser, and by choosing the service they prefer-- just as they may elect to have a discussion about the page on reddit, twitter, facebook, etc.
With regard to whether sites should be able to have editorial privileges on their own domain, or to what degree should page owners have consent over annotation, we've blogged about that here: https://hypothes.is/blog/involving-page-owners-in-annotation...
There's a wide diversity of opinion. Some suggested a flag where site owners could register their preference not to be annotated. Overriding that flag would invite additional scrutiny from moderators. Others have suggested that such a flag not be able to be overridden.
I'm the founder of Hypothes.is, and here to say that we're delighted for researchers us to use us in this way. So far, our primary emphasis has been on collaborative annotation with others on documents vs individual annotation. That said, we hope to layer on additional features where appropriate, and to collaborate with other products and services when we can--particularly ones that support open standards and open source software.
They're "permanent" in that they're not controlled by the site owners. But without effective moderation, a public channel of annotations will become unusable, so spam and trolls must be dealt with effectively.
We've had discussions with them, they'll take a little longer to engage, but I'm encouraged that they probably will-- I think annotation is inevitable for scholarship, regardless of whether it's using our technology or not.
https://hypothes.is/blog/involving-page-owners-in-annotation...