In March 2001, I recommended an earlier revision of this paper to readers of the fadori mailing list, saying, "Interesting thoughts on reputation systems, collaborative filtering, content annotation for virtual communities, and more ..."

The latest version of the paper, logged here, will appear in the upcoming July 2002 edition of First Monday.

Going public?

Abstract: Shared opinions drive society: what we read, how we vote, and where we shop are all heavily influenced by the choices of others. However, the cost in time and money to systematically share opinions remains high, while the actual performance history of opinion generators is often not tracked.

This article explores the development of a distributed open opinion layer, which is given the generic name of TOOL. Similar to the evolution of IP as an underlying layer for many computational tasks, we suggest that all open opinion layers can conceptually be merged into a single underlying TOOL layer that will become a common substrate upon which many scientific, commercial, and social activities will be based.

Valuation decisions are ubiquitous in human interaction and thought itself. Incorporating information valuation into a computational layer will be as significant a step forward as our current communication and information retrieval layers.