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Internet Metadata - Open Collaborative Rating
XenonOfArcticus writes "INMD is a recently-submitted proposal for an open collaborative profile-based ratings system for Internet Web/Usenet content. Based on a system partially inspired by Slashdot itself, it seeks to facilitate content rating that does not force censorship. The purpose behind INMD is to allow the user to choose what criteria to use when filtering/sorting content, and whose opinions should impact their browsing.Don't want the RIAA or MPAA to influence your Internet? Exclude them. Want your opinions controlled by the NRA? Submit your browsing to their discretion. You remain in control. " Looks still quite beta, but it's a cool idea - something like everything, in terms of rating knowledge/content.
This is a great idea, basically, rating things simular to how Deja news can rate UseNet articles, but on a larger scale, it only draws attention to the posts that happen to get rated high. There's to much VOLUME going thru the web/Usenet to rate anything on a larger scale like this seems to intend to do.
Slashdot works becouse there is a relatively small amount of content, and a large user base. Reverse that, and you get someones great idea that never comes to fruition.
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
I'd like to see something along the same lines, although instead of a ratings system, or meta "description", I'd like to see categories from either the Dewey Decimal system or the Library of Congress categorization system. It'd make indexing a hell of a lot easier.
To make things more manageable. Look at usenet, it is currently an extreme case of "information overload". There's quite a lot of good/interesting stuff in it, but sometimes it's like sifting cubic meters of sea water to filter out gold atoms: not worth it.
Information overload is IMO becoming a real problem. Collaborative rating might provide a way to deal with it.
In the more "traditional" media outlets, we've had little to no choice as to what that filtering mechanism has been. Going to alternate sources (such as the internet!) has been an iffy exercise -- much more information available but without the same credibilty as the "safer" outlets. (Whether the credibility or lack thereof is actually deserved is a whole other topic...)
A system such as this allows people to choose who they trust to act as filters for them. The question comes down to who it is that you trust to make these descisions for you. There's a loss of personal freedom in ceding your though process to others, but a large gain in convenience.
Of course, a good filtering system should let you turn it off whenever you want...
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Also, it might be a good idea to have some kind of "matching" system whereby your taste (in raters or items) is matched to other's so that their opinions can be taken into account. This is somewhat similar a recommendation service I've seen on amazon. I haven't studied GroupLens in detail, but perhaps it has these aspects too.
Yeah, but the obvious question is then "Who makes the categories" and "What categories are right / fair"? Yahoo attempts to categorize the web, and many sites appear in multiple categories. These categories aren't rated in any way that I know of. And then there's the issue of what features of a site/category to rate -- movies have sex/violence/profanity levels, but these are mostly for parental restriction of children. When it comes to issues of personal preference, having ratings based like "site enjoyed by slashdot readers and hated by Reactionary Republicans" would be more useful. A "Dewey Decimal System" for web sites (or news articles) won't really cut it, IMHO. However, categorization may be the only practical way to get the general populace to rate things.
..." variety. I personally find that information very useful when looking for CDs. Oftentimes I find albums I would never have heard of, but the system also points me to bestsellers which are similar. Going to the bestseller then gives me more information on other good CDs. Could this work for web sites and news articles as well?
Another issue is the large data / small readership problem brought up in a previous post. Unless organizations are willing to go and rate site upon site, how will there ever be enough rating information to be useful? Rating books and albums works on Amazon.com partially because there's a simple 5-star customer review system (even simpler than categorization) and partially because it's a restricted data domain. Also, if someone writes a review for one book they've read, they're likely to write reviews for others.
Maybe web sites should offer a "Rate Me" button linked to some third-party rating company. Inspired surfers can follow the link and rate the site on a few static categories or offer their own comments. This could also give us cross-information of the "surfers who liked this site also liked
The main problem with this models is most sites won't offer a "Rate Me!" button. Alternatively, a rating company could set up a "meta-site" in which you can surf (using frames, for example) and have a "Rate This Site" button in the margins. Unfortunately, rating by URL is risky since the often change, but it's a first step.
Anyways, I guess my point is rating systems go beyond how they're designed; you also must consider how they're deployed (as other posters have mentioned). Solve that problem, stick an ad banner on it, and you've got the next great web fortune which will be bought out by Microsoft and eventually hacked by someone reading this.
What exactly defines the web?
RFC2616?
Make a little daemon that sits on port 80 and browsers work with, but doesn't fully comply with the RFC.
Anything on port 80?
Change the port.
Anything that uses HTML?
What about Flash, java and other things of the sort? Or use a cgi script to insert the contents of a normal text file in a page... the illegal content would not in HTML by nature, just inserted in it because of the viewer.
The most feasable solution is client side filtering and this is also riddled with holes. What defines a client? If you telnet to a site and read it would it be illegal? Would there have to a commitee to decide exactly what you are allowed to use as a web browser? It would either fail pitifully or turn big brother.
If all else fails, make a new protocal that is cosmetically the same but functions differently.
In short: it's near impossible to do and legal battle after legal battle would have to be fought over it wasting more money than it would ever be worth.
Slashdot is not an example of this at all. When reading Slashdot, you do not choose which moderators' opinions are used to score the articles presented to you. This collaborative stuff if far superior to Slashdot.
Ideally, if you wanted pro-Microsoft posts at the top so that you read 'em first, then you would just select a pro-MS moderator (or an averaged board of moderators, some of which might be computers that automatically mark down documents that contain "LINUX RULEZ D00D", for example.)
Er, anyway, please don't confuse this with Slashdot-style moderation. What these guys are discussing is much, much cooler.
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Have a Sloppy day!
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Assuming the author is seriously suggesting this (it's hard to tell by the writing style and gross errors in these "drafts"), this idea would never take off.
Firstly, consider just how massive and transient data is on the Internet. Now imagine for yourself a database capable of indexing and storing *ratings* for this massive volume of data, including necessary security precautions such as "this-person-has-already-rated-this-item", etc. The amount of data required for such a database is truly staggaring, and, depending on the popularity of an item being rated, could likely exceed the storage requirements of the item itself. This isn't even considering the database of users that would be required in an authenticated setting as he's suggesting.
Assuming one could construct such a titanic database, a rating system like this would only really be effective for static content (like non-dynamic web sites). Things like newsgroup articles stick around for a few days -- weeks at most. This is hardly enough time to get "moderators" to accurately rate articles in all but the most popular newsgroups. Face it: Slashdot has several orders of magnitude more readers and posters than any one newsgroup heirarchy in existence. It would be a rare thing to have more than one or two posts in a given newsgroup rated, and that rating would be virtually meaningless because of this.
The bottom line is that this is unfeasible and would not be adopted widely, which would be essential for its growth and continued use.
Just my $0.02 ($0.02 Canadian).
I'm violently opposed to censorship. But I don't consider Slashdot censorship, even if Andover was the government. Hence, this is the closest thing to a workable plan I've seen yet. And I believe that it may be a matter of we solve "the problem" or governments will do it for us. However, there are issues. The question should be, can they be solved?
The most serious concern is that a government could somehow piggyback on the system to implement effective censorship.
The issue of upstream filtering does not go away.
As described, this may just shift the battle from which pages should be banned, to which ratings groups should be banned.
As pointed out, many technical issues like bandwidth are involved.
People being what they are, it might be far more common for people to moderate against pages that offend them, than for good pages to be promoted. Remember, people don't vote for important things, like national elections, and this is webpages.
Should this work like Slashdot, with only one group of raters chosen randomly, or by various groups with an agenda you can choose between (or both)? In the former case, you need attributes like Informative, Insightful, Troll, except they probably read more like Sexually Explicit, Rude Language, Violence, and Politically Subversive. Note those are all "negative". Finding a positive attribute set that would promote the right pages to the right people seems difficult. Also, summing attributes simply won't work, you need a complex filter that weighs the entire set thru a scheme controlled by the user. (Hey, this would be nice for slashdot too!)
It also leads to something of a privacy question in that it becomes trivial to determine a web publishers political views, by looking at their rating spectrum.
I think the authors should be encouraged to complete their proposal, and given feedback by all those concerned by the drawbacks. *If* a grass roots rating system that was impossible to abuse could be designed, it would be solution to a very important problem.
That's completely false.
Every day I expicitly verify that some 10 randomly selected moderations were fair. Many days I find 10 fair moderations. Only occasionally do I find one I thing was unfair.
Anyway, the comments that are moderated up include many viewpoints, many of which don't mention Linux at all. There are even some comments that get moderated up which point out faults with Linux.
But then, if you were involved with /., you'd know that. In case it wasn't already clear, you are welcome to get an account here and participate in the meta-moderation. You could even attach a username to the things you say.
Using something like this would require the maintainer of that information to be trustworthy. If I didn't like the fact that my web site was being rated down, I would just be able to go in and make changes.
The "draft" being discussed calls more for an independent collection of servers holding and serving ratings information. It seems the storage requirements for such a thing would be enormous enough, but I just now started thinking about the *bandwidth* requirements. For every web page you request, for every newsgroup you download, a connection must be made and ratings retrieved for everything. Yeoww..
The key is, of course, allowing the user to filter ratings from any person/group they disapprove of.. or also allow composite scores from several groups (say, for example, you want Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich to edit content for you... Rush rates 'Hot Sexy Babe Website' absolute filth, while Newt maybe only rates it 'indecent'. Composite score: 'Worth a Visit').
The key here is to allow the user maximum flexibility with the system while ensuring that only people who are going to make an honest effort in the system gain access. Nominations are a time-tested method because it simply relies on peer pressure ("I nominated you - don't embarrass me now by acting like an ass!").
So there. Oh, and Rob.. if you're listening... how about we make that long-awaited revision to the current moderation system and open it up alittle (like the suggestion above?)... it's time to try something new...
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