From: bryce@digicash.com
Date: Wed, 25 Sep 1996 23:44:35 +0800
To: tcmay@got.net (Timothy C. May)
Subject: reputation, e.g. www.ffly.com (was: Not reputation again! (Was: The Nature of the Cypherpunks List) )
In-Reply-To: <ae6e375801021004b001@[207.167.93.63]>
Message-ID: <199609251219.OAA28483@digicash.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----

It's silly to conflate ratings of people with ratings of
people's opinions with ratings of people's ratings of etc.


Some of the people I work with have awful opinions on politics,
other people, music, movies, books, and food, but great opinions
on computer hardware, algorithms and programming languages.


But their ratings as people are generally very high.


(Insert inaccurate but amusing joke to the effect that if 
someone has good taste in restaurants they are likely to have 
poor taste in video cards, or some such.)


Check out Firefly (www.ffly.com).  (Cpunk comment:  they only
track your ratings by nym, no True Name required.)


Firefly has the "if I agreed with Bob a lot in the past on this
subject, I'll probably agree with him again" heuristic.  It
appears to be a pretty ugly heuristic when applied to me.  Ffly
keeps trying to suggest music which is in the same _genre_ as 
music I have previously recommended, but what I am interested is
music that is similarly _good_.  My tastes don't correspond well
to genres.


But this is a mere anecdotal impression.  Give it a spin.  


I wrote in the suggestion box that they add meta-ratings
(especially ratings on the little "movie reviews" submitted by
other FFly users).  Some guy wrote back (same day!) that they
were planning on it.


Regards,

Bryce




-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: 2.6.2i
Comment: Auto-signed under Unix with 'BAP' Easy-PGP v1.1b2

iQB1AwUBMkkjQkjbHy8sKZitAQF5wAL/WgD5iPOR7RtCc5SNgLMGqKUJqHLiS7bM
XItX4p8Z1Uri5DZgAUoOCDZ7iEoP3rleDBThGq3rFG8y6I9tbFueC00TRwoft5rb
fR7pqeaDj2AzcSt4rYCi67ucsW4wQi1C
=rL1w
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----