Enabling Webs Of Trust Through Mobile News Publishing

This is a proposal for the extension of the Blogosphere, the network of Weblogs. It includes an interesting presentation outlining the idea of a network of independent, interactive 'freeporters' and a good discussion of the way relationships work between sender and receiver in networks. "MPN (Mobile Publishing News) spreads short voice messages through a web of trust; credibility decays until a threshold where the message is dropped. It comes with a program for recording and sending messages as well as plugins for XMMS and WinAmp that play received messages. Individual Blogs are connected by their users implicitly: a community emerges, because users regularly read and comment on others' entries. By making this connexions explicit, a web of trust is created which functions like a reputation mechanism. The resulting system leverages the advantages of social networks for the distribution of news. It can be implemented as a decentralised system, with a simple extension to the Blogosphere. The system is explained in a paper and in the presentation at the Mobile Entertainment conference in Manchester (http://www.mobile-ent.org/)".