[ChuckMcM]

Interesting, the term 'advocato' doesn't yield much in the terms of research along these routes, do you have a paper reference? (Lori Avocato does have a few papers that pop up on scholar.google.com though, I bet she got kidded a lot in grade school)

So perhaps the ideal karmic feedback device for this system is a compass rose with a center button. This would be

                <agree>
                   |
  <not this> - <perfect> - <more this>
                   |
               <disagree>

The idea being that you could choose 'perfect' (which would exclude all other choices) or you could choose one of agree/disagree and one of not this/more this.

The idea of course is that there is an inferred 'commonality' point and by dropping these comments and stories you can have people give an indication of where they sit relative to those inferred points.

And while it certainly might lead to a bunch of 'echo chambers' my experience in such systems is that it pulls people out of those echo chambers into bigger clumps than that.

[evgen]

Damn autocorrect; you catch one letter and miss the correction on the other one -- two paras in I still had not noticed that my response appeared to be discussing avocados.. "advogato" is the system I was referencing, and if you want to dig into similar work check out papers by Cai-Nicolas Ziegler, some of Pattie Maes old work, and Hugo Liu's work from before he joined Hunch.