The good, the bad, and the subjective.

Working on the presentation for tomorrow to the Infomatik group. Came up with a nice diagram about rating stuff on the internet. (Or anywhere in info-space, I suppose)

• It's easier to be objective about poor quality. No one will that phishing sites or viruses have redeeming qualities. This is the domain of virus-checkes and spyware detection programs.
• For high quality, the best objective measure is popularity. This is the domain of search engines, and reviewing systems like those in Amazon or Epinions.
• For "intesting" and "funny", the best sytems so far try to distill popularity information by some pattern-matching algorithms. This is the domain of stumbleupon. (Although del.icio.us does this to some extent too.)
• The holy grail of search is to find items which are subjectivly good. These are items which are completely relevant to what the user is currently wanting.
• ...and the holy grail of all information management is this:
  To protect people from stuff that is really bad (dangerous),
  hide stuff that is bad,
  introduce that is good,
  and help find stuff that is really good (what they're looking for).

Outfoxed is no magic bullet, but it does make a big push into the direction of the subjective. What could be a better indicator of subjective worth than the opinions of those socially closest to the subject?