the concept of the trusted web
I wrote some weeks ago, that cryptographic signing mechanisms would be a good solution for getting spammers and vandals of from Wikipedia. The more i think about this idea, the more appealing this idea sounds to me. Today at showering i had the following idea.
Many problems can be solved by overlaying the web of content with a web of trust. Okay, take google as an example: The algorithm for google search don´t obey the worth of the information itself, it´s only aware of the link topology of the internet. Okay, this is an natural limitation of automatic indexing, as computers need an algorithm to classify, they don´t understand the content, so they have no idea of the content. So they cannot speparate usefull content or SEO.
Now think about the following concept:
- The website owner gets a certificate from a well-known trust center.
- The website owner signs an xml-website descriptor and puts it under http://hostname.domainname.tld/website.dec.
- Google extracts the website descriptor.
Okay, by this you can build up a web of trust beneath web site owners, they have nothing to do, only to link each other. Google takes this amount of trusted links into consideration for calculating the page rank. For example a huge headstart in pagerank calculation for all pages in the trusted web ensuring that trusted websites would appear first at google.
By establishing a connection from a website to a real person by certificates you have one person liable for the links. So you can start to enforce terms and condition. As an example: Certain search engine optimizations are disallowed in the trusted web. By signing the website descriptor you accept the terms and conditions. Now you have two ways to enforce the terms and conditions:
- The “lawyer-oriented-way”. Establish contract fines for abusing the trusted web.
- The “self-regulation-way”. Reduce the pagerank from trusted websites, that links to an abusing trusted website, as long they don´t remove the links to it or extend their “website.dec” with an “ignore links to or from www.spammer.com”. So the go-bad-websites would be isolated soon in the trusted web, as the other website-owners want to preserve their pagerank.
- The “lawyer-oriented-way”. Establish contract fines for abusing the trusted web.