Scott Rutherford

I was out with Paul Walsh from Segala earlier this week and he was going over the concept of Content Labels. I think this sounds like a very interesting proposal and something I will be more than happy to get behind. He outlines the concept in plain English in this post

It will be very interesting to see how this standard develops. It also got me to thinking how good it would be if we could come up with a ‘Wisdom of the Crowds” version for self certification and to encompass the long, long tail of the web.

Basically as it stands a 3rd party would give you a content label to use on your site, this would show that you were accessible, safe for kids, etc. Now thats great but is not going to be suitable for smaller sites who would suffer through their exclusion in search results. So you have self-certification, well fine, but people aren’t always honest…...

So, wouldn’t it be cool if those sites could show a badge declaring themselves to conform to some accepted content label. The badge would show the label and also the number of people who have agreed or disagreed with the claim, along with the ability to click to agree or disagree. The information could be held by anyone happy to host an OpenTrust server (or maybe even integrate it into OpenID). Then the rating for that site could be judged by the ratio of the ratings, tada distributed content qualification.