Online Reputation Is Hard To Do

Symblized writes "A new article from InformationWeek argues that not only does the Web need ways to verify identity, it also needs better ways to measure reputation . The article uses Digg, Wikipedia, and eBay as examples and muses whether their models could be applied more widely. There's also a profile of Opinity, a company that tried to introduce a reputation system and didn't make it. Choice quote from a source in the article: 'The idea of a transferable, semantic reputation is identity nirvana.'"

Re:eh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone dropped an anchor tag.

Re:What about LinkedIn?

[Phil Resch]

Regarding your P2P network of friends ... have you heard of WASTE? If I understand you correctly, it's more or less what you're suggesting. At any rate, its Wikipedia page is worth reading. It has some interesting information, and a lot of links to follow: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASTE [wikipedia.org]

Advogato

[MSG]

Well, there's Advogato's Trust Metric [advogato.org] system.

I've been of the opinion for a while that a similar system could be devised using PGP or S/MIME certificates to combine identity verification with "web of trust" reputation evaluation. Under such a model, every user would import the public certificate of authorities that they trust. For example, consider a consumer review web site, where I decide to trust the site's admin. The admin trusts its editorial staff, and their certificates are signed by the admin. Any of the editorial staff may trust one of the site's frequent contributors, based on the quality of their work. That editor may sign the contributor's certificate. Now, my level of trust for that contributor can be established as a function of the proximity of that user to the admin in whom I placed trust. This differs from Advogato's system in that the "Master" certificates are simply those whom I've decided to trust.

The same thing can be applied to social networking sites, as well. I can trust my friends by accepting their certificates, and gain insight into social relationships by examining the signatures in their keys.

Reputation vs. identity

[btempleton]

The article claims to be about reputation but mostly talks about the various "identity" efforts out there. Yes, a reputation is associated with an identity, but most of the identity systems being promoted focus on real identity rather than pseudonyms which you can choose to associate with yourself or not.

There is a paradox to those systems -- the easier they are to use, the more they will get used -- and demanded. We'll go from a web where most web sites can be used casually, with no "sign on" (single or otherwise) to a web where far more sites demand you use the single sign on and thus have an account, because it's easy for them to ask.

This paradox is described at http://ideas.4brad.com/paradox-identity-management [4brad.com]

Re:Hear, hear!

[Cyberax]

There ARE modifications of AK-47 and AK-74 for NATO ammo.