> I'm guessing the plan is to evolve this into some sort of a web service. 

The basis of it wouldn't be a web service, but a peer-to-peer network for exchanging information and associated opinions about that data. However, web services could certainly built on top of it, just like you see web sites built on top of Hive, that offer different ways to look at the underlying data. 

The underlying protocol would definitely be open-sourced. For sites built on top of it, the choice of open-sourcing would be up to each operator. But I see the most valuable and trustworthy analysis being done by open-source software being run on computers controlled by each individual user.

> If the idea of "information rating system" is to allow anyone to rate anyone without worrying about being censored, it's probably going in the right direction. 
>I have questions like what stops someone with a lot resources from controlling a group of bots to create a fake network? Or what IS identity in this system? What gives one rating more relevance to me vs another rating?

One of the aims of this idea is indeed to operate as a better alternative to censorship. I believe the current calls for censorship are the wrong solution to a real problem: the problem of media manipulation in the form of bots, paid shills, etc. Centralized censorship is very dangerous because it puts too much power into too few hands. But the power of a few people to manipulate the information supplied to a lot of people is probably equally dangerous, especially when the information sources can magnify the power of their speech so that it appears to come from many people (e.g. using bots). They are two sides of the same coin.

There's various algorithms that can be used to detect a fake network made up of bots, but this is a somewhat technical topic, so I'm reserving the discussion for a future post.