Spencer Critchley proposes a method for tracking the reputation of a politician over at O’Reilly’s blogs.
This could very well be called the Age of Recursion. Starting with Google’s original PageRank idea the power of applied recursion is really starting to take off (for data analysis at least).
In a nutshell: for some value you want to measure (in this case trustworthiness) you calculate based in part on the values of related data.
It’s something we do every day already. Do I trust Fox News (short answer: not really)? Here’s a way to find out: find out who is saying things about Fox News and determine their trustworthiness. If the only people praising Fox News happen to work for (or somehow benefit from) Fox News, it’s highly likely that Fox isn’t very trustworthy. You can take this as far as you want and it produces pretty useful results.
Combine the recursive calculation with a moderation system and you have a meta-moderation system in place for virtually anything you want. It’s the cross-product of direct democracy and itself (often with a dampening factor thrown in for good measure).
What other problems can such thinking address? Virtually any sort of commentary problem can be mapped to a recursive solution.
The UCSC proposal even addresses the notion of gaming the system introduced by building a good rep. and going crazy: timestamping the reputation value.
Neat stuff.