WOT: Web Of Trust -- Interesting Community-driven Security Rating Website

[mouser]

This is an interesting website the looks like it's trying to serve a similar role as McAfee SiteAdvisor, but using a very different mechanism.  The main idea is to collect real user opinions about the safety ratings of different sites to determine security and display this information while you surf.  There are IE and Firefox addons.

Anyone try this and want to offer any opinion about it?  The video tutorial looks like it might be a little too pre-emptive for my tastes (i.e. it looks like it's popping up alerts and stuff rather than a showing subtle indications) but there may be options to change that and i'm curious to hear what other people think.

It's free (though it seems clear there is some kind of money making plan or buyout plan in here eventually..)  Certainly looks work a try.

What is WOT?
WOT, short for "Web of Trust," is a community whose members exchange knowledge of websites: Can they be trusted? Are they safe to use? Do they deliver what they promise? If a site has a bad reputation, WOT will warn you - and save you a lot of trouble. By joining the WOT community you can protect yourself and help others. Our mission is to make the Internet safer by giving our users a way to share their experience of websites and the services they offer. WOT is a powerful tool - and it's free! We have information on more than 19 million sites. Join us today and make the Internet safer for us all.

Who is behind WOT?
Aside from the community, there is a hard-working team behind the WOT service. Headed by serial entrepreneur Esa Suurio, Against Intuition Inc. focuses on developing and providing software and services for the WOT community and promotes the community's goals of Internet security for everyone.

Against Intuition was founded in 2006 by two visionary graduate students, Timo Ala-Kleemola and Sami Tolvanen, who now are developing the system further with the aid of a group of talented software developers, designers and database administrators.

http://www.mywot.com/

[Lashiec]

Just a comment: Sami Tolvanen is the original developer of Eraser, so we're not exactly talking about security newcomers.

I miss more information about the sites. A trust value is OK, but it would be nice to know why a site should be trusted or not, by each reputation category, I mean, comments by users linked to each category. Also, the linkback thing is a good idea, but I saw a few "Trusted blogs" entries, which they explain as "Referenced in blog of trusted authors", but I could not find info about what conforms the criteria for a trusted blog, nor a list of these blogs.