December 22, 2004
Approving user accounts through a network of trust
It would be very nice to handle identity approval on a more networked level. Basically I would trust authors of my entire blogroll to approve users with a degree of wisdom I could live with for my own site. I'd probably also trust their blogroll, and so on. Of course this network of trust is in no way explicitely mapped, so I have to treat all new users alike. Meaning of course I'm going to assume the worst.
A few formats exist that allow to express trust in a machine readable way. There are a couple of trust related extensions for FOAF, but FOAF is RDF and no one gets RDF, which makes it a poor choice for a format that is useless unless widely employed.
Earlier this year I had a conversation with Tantek Çelik about abusing the fabulous XHTML Friends Network as a way to express trust. Unfortunately the idea never got anywhere, which is something of a pity.
I think that given the unequal distribution of weblog audience it would be very feasible to escape the chicken/egg problem of metadata for this purpose (meaning no one likes to annotate data unless everyone else is already doing it). If only a few A-List bloggers would step forward and publish a few thousand combined trust ratings in a format as simple as XFN, this thing could really take off.
This whole issue about approving people and assholes posting viagra ads is so old, I cannot believe we haven't solved it already. I realize that trust can be delicate thing to universally define, but we don't need a perfect solution but a solution that is better than nothing. With some effort we could take away 90% of the pain that is abusive behaviour on anything that has a "Post" button. Let's not keep that chance unused forever.
