Here's another offering in the arena of social search: Outfoxed is the implementation of Stan James's master's thesis on Trusted Metadata Distribution Using Social Networks. The idea is to get beyond the model of objectively weighting links by number, moving towards showing you subjective, trusted ratings of pages from your cohorts and contacts in your search results. As you surf, you can make explicit assessments of the sites and services you're visiting. These trust assessments get published as RSS 1.0 files with some extra tags that are parsed by Outfoxed. Your contacts are privy to your assessments, which then show up in your search results ("rated good," "rated dangerous," etc.). Outfoxed is a Firefox extension downloadable here — it's only going to be as good as who you know who's already using it. Is there a meta-way out of this perennial catch-22?
1. I thought Outfoxed was a documentary about Fox News propaganda.
Posted at 8:05PM on Dec 18th 2005 by gas fireplaces blog