-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Futplex sez:
A reviewer named Susan Granger, for example, is known to me as a person who routinely lauds lousy movies. Thus it's simple for me to ignore her positive recommendations (I've yet to see a negative review from her). In fact, when I observe that a new film prominently features her seal of approval in its advertising, I take that fact as an indication of the lack of praise from more discriminating reviewers. So a nominal "positive" credential may be interpreted as an implicit negative credential, depending upon context.
OTOH, if I only give digital thumbs-up to a couple of people on the list, those who consider me a reputable appraiser-of-cpunks should find the information relatively useful. I'm sure I can manage to be a harsher critic than your 2nd-grade teacher :} Using e.g. a single 1-10 scale would be highly practical for such purposes, IMHO.
There are people working on an extension of UseNet to allow each reader to publish ratings which propagate in the same way that articles do. These ratings can be of specific articles, of threads or of authors. Your newsreaders can rank the articles and present them to you in highest-to-lowest ranked order, or kill all those below a certain mark, or some such. The heuristic that the researchers originally started with was "if I agreed with so-and-so in the past then I'll probably agree with him again." (Personally I would rather have some degree of manual control over my ratings-weightings. My good friends automatically get more weight than people I don't know, regardless of how much our ratings coincide. Similarly I might want to downgrade certain net.assholes just out of a sense of justice, even if they recommend good articles usually. :-) ) Unfortunately I have lost the URL for this wonderful experiment. Hopefully the fruits of their labors will become publically available soon. I will certainly be one of the first to sign up to distribute ratings and to listen to (some) other people's. Bryce signatures follow: + public key on keyservers /. island Life in a chaos sea or via finger 0x617c6db9 / bryce.wilcox@colorado.edu ---* -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 Comment: Auto-signed with Bryce's Auto-PGP v1.0beta3 iQCVAwUBMEvcJfWZSllhfG25AQE+0QQAj2rx2gT9gaYlMyhiJd3TkfrjAS9dVcYk iFUHu1wsrcIoXvHExRmvborJArcix7uz/qptO9lg8DHRAxHYGtJyEzDaCnq60juz xFHt/7NdV+gLIv5JVHFDCxTzzfmwNSvr5Q2Rb5vv8jUmih4AhSzkApBHF/lzFhNH 2U3SYK7Vmhc= =Zodf -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----