Got something for those of us who aren't mathematicians? I mean, I appreciate you've put a lot of thought into this and I'm sure it seems perfectly sensible to you, but expecting us mere mortals to determine our response to a given situation by matrix multiplication is maybe expecting a little more than our capabilities can afford.

the matrix multiplication will be done behind the scenes; you can just pay attention to the output: a number for each other person, saying how much you are likely to respect them, given who you say you respect.

it's like a count: how many friends respect this person, how many friends of friends, how many friends of friends of friends, etc.

Webs of trust are very hard to bootstrap. Probably the most serious attempt in our industry was Advogato:

http://www.advogato.org/trust-metric.html

That was an awesome read. Cool idea.