Monday, November 15, 2010

CiteYa

I am an avid science junkie and I read loads of scientific posts, papers and books that use citations as a way to validate the paper. If a work cites another then it is an acknowledgement of the original work by the author of the new work.

We live in a world where trust cannot be taken for granted. Trust must be earned and the best way to earn it is to have other people say how good your work is. When we use a hyperlink however, that trust is implied. I will go to your site and see what you have to say.

This is the moment when the popup box tells you that your computer is infected with a Trojan virus and, oh, we can scan your computer for you. It's free.....

Wouldn't it be nice to have a measure of trust for a hyperlink? One measure of course would simply be to know how many people link to that page. If loads of people have created a link, then we can assume that the content is good and follow the link.

Google of course do this. They use billions of watts of power to crawl the web, searching for links and noting where each and every one goes. This is proprietary information though and using it comes at a price. We either pay for advertising or we pay by giving away information about ourselves when we use Google.

I awoke at 2:30 in the morning, a couple of weeks ago, and thought that it would be great to have a system that gave you a measure of trust in a page before you click the link. My solution is CiteYa.com

CiteYa enables you to create a link that tells you how many others link to that same page. It can also tell you how users rate the site before you go there. It works with some simple ASP.Net and javascript and is in need of users.

The site is simple, free, easy to use and does nothing but enable you to build trust for your pages. Try it out...

http://www.citeya.com/

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