[OLPC library] Tim Berners-Lee

[Samuel Klein]

Hi Skier,

PICS and ICRA are more about applying a set of standardized labels /
categories to materials... and having third-party services that
provide a filter or a view of those materials.    The idea is that the
labels are created once (perhaps a few dozen in a few hundred
dimensions) and the services map simple ideas such as "safe for the
elderly epileptic" onto a constellation of labels.

The idea of a stamp of approval is more specific, less automated, more
labor-intensive.  A group of scientists and engineers picks the
winning papers of the International Science Fair, applying their stamp
to those works.  The judges of the Webby's apply a "nominated for
excellence in fashion 2002" stamp to a set of sites.  A varying set of
editors under a more slowly varying process apply "featured" and
"good" stamps to a set of Wikipedia articles and WikiCommons media.
"Leading educators" list their "500 favorite children's stories". "2
out of 3 doctors" recommend a particular Crest toothpaste "for extra
whitening".  NIT University hands out diplomas online, applying their
"qualified for diploma" stamp to brief public student profiles.  An
uptime service stamps a list of sites as "available" or "down" every
five minutes.

When you can agree on the class of items in your universe -- say, a
set of articles or web pages or books -- you are in a good position to
have a distributed database of stamps; each stamp has an associated
authority (server) which can apply, modify and confirm those stamps...
if you have material that you'd like to be sure is indeed stamped by a
given set of authorities you can check with them or their proxies, and
receive confirmations of varying degrees of certainty depending on how
much detail you provide and they track.  (so one group might simply
stamp sites, without much notion of change over time; another might
stamp specific revisions of articles, another might stamp a specific
revision with a short timeout, so that any stamp not renewed expires
within a day).

Each stamping service has to actually respond to such inquiries in a
reasonable manner, and someone needs to provide a reasonable directory
or aggregation service where you and I can create composite views of
the web based on avaiable stamps (you mention vague second-order
filters such as the set of links stemming from wikis having the
"meta-interwiki map" stamp from the Wikimedia Meta-Wiki).  I don't see
the general idea as one ripe for gleeful abuse; if you have a
mischaracterized stamp, noone will use it.

SJ

On Mon, Sep 15, 2008 at 10:23 PM, S Page <info at skierpage.com> wrote:
> Samuel Klein wrote:
>>
>> I wrote to find out what in particular he has
>> in mind.   some form of organization-neutral content stamping has been
>> discussed and well-understood for over a decade now.
>
> Which one?
>
> 1.
> http://www.w3.org/PICS/ (for content), is it still in use?  It sounds like
> ICRA (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Content_Rating_Association )
> abandoned it and went to a meta tag approach, maybe
>  <meta name="RATING" content="RTA-5042-1996-1400-1577-RTA">
> or
>  <link rel="meta" href="http://www.playboy.com/labels.rdf"
> type="application/rdf+xml" title="ICRA labels" />
>
>
> 2.
> http://www.w3.org/P3P/ (for privacy) never really got much traction, I
> thought some sites revealed P3P policy and browsers could use this to block
> them, but I have no idea if sites and browsers do anything with it.
>
>
> 3.
> It seems that the Browse activity doesn't use the anti-phishing that Firefox
> 3 uses, it'll willingly visit
>
> http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/its-a-trap.html  (demo)
> http://www.urasoudan.com/bbslog/www_smile_co_uk_security_update_online_instant_message/index.html
>
> (Heh, Google Chrome doesn't even know the latter is a phishing site, I
> thought Google provided the blacklist to Mozilla.)
>
>
> 4.
> There's some interesting discussion about the MediaWiki interwiki list, the
> thing that lets a wiki page link to e.g. [[meta:Vision]] instead of
> [http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Vision].  It's turning into a "We trust
> these wikis to avoid spam and monitor links" white list.
>
>
> 5.
> Any system for reputation is immediately seized upon by spammers :-( We've
> had the tools to say exactly what a site or page is about (<meta keywords,
> <meta description) long before Sir Tim's semantic web, but nobody trusts
> them because they're gleefully abused.
>
> I'm sorry that I'm rambling,
> --
> =S   user:skierpage
>