Spock: The Logic of People Search in a Web 2.0 World - Voting and Removing
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In a person's profile, next to every tag, every website, and every related person, there is a blue triangle. When you click that blue triangle you gain access to the ability to vote. You can cast a yes or no vote as to whether that particular item is relevant to that person. Here's an example for the Spock robot (yes, Spock has a profile, albeit a fairly skimpy one, for its "mascot"):
Yes you can see who else voted on a particular tag by clicking the link. This isn't the only way you can see that either. If you go to the all tags view (as I explained in the first part), on the right hand side you'll see a small box with the names of everyone who voted on those tags and how many times they voted. If you hover over any one particular tag, the names of those who voted on that tag are highlighted in yellow in the box.
What if you have added a tag, website, or relationship to a profile and you decide later that it isn't appropriate? If no one else has voted on it, you can remove it by clicking on the blue triangle next to it and changing your vote. For relationships, it's completely removed without a trace. For tags and websites, however, it stays as a negative tag or negative website (in this case, negative simply means that it was voted down) and can be accessed via a link in the appropriate section that will "show tags with negative scores" or "show websites with negative scores." If there's a way to make a tag or website permanently disappear without a trace, I haven't found it yet.
Just as a side note, Spock doesn't seem to be automatically checking for duplicates yet. I accidentally added a duplicate URL to Shatner's websites, and later voted it down to "delete" it. It didn't have the same title showing as the one it duplicated ("williamshatner.com" instead of "Official website"); I don't know whether that had any effect or not. Spock is, after all, still in private beta, so they may add some kind of de-duping feature later.
Here is an image of a fully-expanded drop down for voting on a tag. You'll notice that I already voted on this tag, along with one other person:
You can see the number of votes that particular tag received, whether they were positive or negative, who voted, and how long ago they voted. This can give you a good feeling for the relevance of certain tags and descriptions of a person. I hope that Spock has some very good spam controls in place for this though. Otherwise, the profiles of famous people may have to be locked; I didn't add "big ego" as a tag to William Shatner's profile, but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't sorely tempted.
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