Evolving a Commons

Yet another Doc Searls related post for the day....

Doc feels that we don't have a "commons" in which to gather. The issue of ownership seems to be the big sticking point. I think that there are many commons already out there, but their value has been destroyed by spam in various forms. Off the top of my head here's a list

• Email
• Usenet news
• IRC
• WWW
• Gopher
• Freenet
• BitTorrent

There are literally thousands of ways that the ends of the internet can be used, to broadcast content. Each and every one of them immediately comes under pressure from spam, the minute it opens, due to the anonymity and the lack of a reputation infrastructure.

Instead of trying to bottle up CRM, flipping it over, and calling it VRM... why not solve the general problem, and build a workable, public, open, Folk standards based reputation system?

If we could do so, then we can ressurect the value of these existing, working systems.

Let's discuss and build our own reputation folksonomy. We'll start simple... make a blog post named folktrust001, with the metatdata you think people might find valuable, in plain english. Use one assertion per line, please.

Everyone interested in helping to get it going will then read it (via google blogs, technorati, or other means)... and start to figure out how to get it all in a standard format that computers can read.

How does that sound? A simple first step.

--Mike--