InterTubes as filtering mechanism

I'm still trying to figure out all of the details of my InterTubes idea. I was replying to one Doc Searls blog posts, and had this to say... and I think it applies to InterTubes

...imagine a world in which twitter isn’t a silo, and it’s possible to rate other users on any scales you wish. You could rate someone on how “corporate shill” or “honest” or “intelligent” or “funny” or how they lean ideologically… and share those ratings.

You’d be able to do it on a single piece of data, or a string of them, or on the person sending them.

This would be a tremendously useful filtering mechanism.

It could apply to almost anything, not just tweet streams.

This is, in fact one of the core features of a Tube, the ability to share metadata about objects in the tube. I think this is a new use case.