Hoo hoo, Raph! Great news on the ghostscript front.

And, on the off chance that you actually read all advoentries, I think the concept on song recommendations is astute. As you say, the cert system can connect what would otherwise be minor, scattered nodes of interest.

In other words, it distills trust out of the entropy of the internet.

The word "trust" has an additional meaning that is appropriate. There is a growing distrust of spam and corpratism. Certain companies, such as <cough> amazon, and other web entities, construct buyer profiles in order to give you recommendations of what you might like. This is a great concept, except for the fact that there is a growing distrust of the corporations. Well, the distrust has always been there for the naturally paranoid, but this stance has started to (thankfully) spread to the popular consciousness.

However, by bringing the cert system into the equation, the recs you receive are by choice. In addition, other participants are possibly influencing your choice without even knowing it. Is is the purest form of vote, where the vote not only counts, but counts in a direct and tangible way.

In a sense, the end user gets ultimate control over what sort of solicited responses they harvest.

I like it. I like it a lot. Great concept. Their still remains that nuggest of trust, though -- it only works if the end user feels that the data they volunteer (recs, and whose recs they prefer) are being kept confidential. If Amazon implemented this system, I wouldn't trust my privacy farther than I could throw it.

So how do you marry the advogato cert system with a distributed service?