For quite a while now, I have been advocating a rating system based on *calculating correlations* of people's interests in each topic domain. This allows to: - give personalized ratings to each user; - filter out any number of "evil tentacles" recommending you junk; - suggest incentives to each user to rate articles; - introduce digicash payments for all messages and ratings; - implicitly use quality criteria that are difficult to formalize; - find like-minded people, even if you never post anything In short, it works like this: you read stuff, if you like it, you pay for it as much as you want; what you pay is considered your rating of the article; the System calculates correlations of your ratings with everybody else's; you can select articles that people with your interests in the given area liked most; so it makes sense for you to pay and be sincere - otherwise the system may not work for you, and you will read too much junk. Also, people whose ratings helped you choose it, can get some share of your payment - another incentive to read early and carefully, and be fair (you can actually earn credits as a critic). Authors can establish minimal payments for their texts, but it will be not their advertizing headers, but the opinions of like-minded with *you* people that will help you choose texts. I have a more or less detailed development proposal for such a system and would be happy to share it if anybody is interested. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ | Alexander Chislenko | sasha@cs.umb.edu | Cambridge, MA | (617) 864-3382 | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------