Apr 10

With all due respect ...   Posted by sharps, tagged with anonymity blogging ethics openid opinity reputation sierra

I think Tim O'Reilly has it wrong. His blogger's code of conduct, while well intentioned, is unworkable. What the web needs is a reputation system. And by reputation I mean the social evaluation of a person, group or entity. The Social Evaluation - that's the important bit.

Here's how it would work. If you want to be taken seriously, people need to know who you are; something like OpenID would be adequate for this. Strictly it doesn't really provide anyone with any level of trust that you are who you say you are - but that's OK; just knowing that you're the same entity that left comments on other sites, or contributed to a wikipedia article is enough. Next we need a way of recording a reputation against OpenIDs - people should be able to very simply score you on your level of insight, wit, general behavior, etc. on the web - this has been solved locally for ebay and slashdot; what we now need is some way to federate your reputation globally.

The need for anonymity can't be pushed aside in this system; there are very good reasons for allowing anonymity. Flaming people or competing products, pumping up your own views, etc. are not good uses of anonymity and unfortunately cast the use of Anonymity in a bad light. Like I said there are good reasons for anonymity to be maintained for those who really need it -  I live in a country and work for an organization where I hope I'll never need to hide my opinion. But there are many circumstances where anonymity is required,

The idea of web-reputation is anything but new - ebay, slashdot, to name a few have been using it successfully for years to provide user-moderation; what's missing is some convenient standards for federating or compositing reputation. A couple of sites have been trying to just that - for example here's my Opinity page. Opinity is a service that allows me to have some control over my on line reputation and does some degree of reputation compositing; but it isn't perfect; and it isn't really widely enough used to be of much practical use (today).

Here's my prediction - as the web moves inevitably towards adopting user-centric identity; reputation (and federated reputation) won't be far behind.

What do you think ?