Jason asks,

"What if Slashdot (or other online communities...Usenet for example) instituted something like Epinions Web of Trust system? Instead of having to read through everything, a user could just read stuff posted by people they trust...and by people that those people trust. A Six Degreed, Epinioned Slashdot."

What if, indeed! What if there were a shared "Web of Trust" among all these sites? I've often thought that a much more interesting business model for SixDegrees would be to license their data, in an XML format, to other sites/applications that could do interesting things with that data -- i.e., SlashDot or Epinions could use it for the basis of their webs of trust. Dice could use it to help match contractors with companies, based on trusted relationships and referals. Et cetera.

Hmmm...a bit of a privacy issue, yes. Perhaps abated somewhat by the credit-report model of only giving people access to your information if you said it was okay. Hmmm...perhaps still a problem. An intriguing one, though.