The question on the table is, can a information filtering system turn
around and monetize itself? And the answer, I think, is yes. The
motivating example is the dollar bill. A dollar is a dollar is a
dollar, whether I use it to purchase smut, or useful information, or
a soda. Only through dollars can all of these other things assume
values relative to each other, though: you would never hear someone
talking about bartering smut for food.
*blink blink*
Or would you?
Anyway, I still think that any rating system (such as the information
filtering provided by GroupLens) could evolve into a monetary system.
The more people that rate this as high on the filter scale, the more
(theoretically) we should be willing to pay for those bits.
A.
To: adam@cs.caltech.edu (I Find Karma)
Subject: Re: Kudos redux.
I think you meant to FoRK this...
RK
PS. you're right. Add the point that this is a Kudo in units of "I think
everyone else would think this is a ____ of *bandwidth*" or *cost*. Other
PICS-based Kudos could be units of *horniness* or *turing-cluefullness* or
*minsky-like*. There is an ethical judgment system in the scale -- I want to
know if the currency can monetize *itself*, spontaneously onto a scale.
Begin forwarded message:
Date: Mon, 12 Feb 96 17:00:05 PST
From: adam@cs.caltech.edu (I Find Karma)
To: khare@w3.org
Subject: Kudos redux.
So, this really does sound like the stone age version of
kudos.
http://www.cs.umn.edu/Research/GroupLens/preview.html
In a nutshell, GroupLens is a system that helps you find the quality
news articles out of the huge volume of news articles generated every
day. To accomplish this the GroupLens system combines your opinions
about articles you have already read with the opinions of others who
have done likewise and produces a prediction for each unread news
article. The predictions are on a scale of 1-5, where a 1 means "this
article is a waste of net.bandwidth" and a 5 means "Hey, this was a
quality article, I would sure like to see more articles like this one"