Rating, identity and reputation

The earliest example I know of for user supplied ratings was the The Boston Restaurant Review is the earliest example I know of for user-contributed ratings. By 1994 they had accumulated over 1,000 Boston area restaurant reviews. Today user ratings are common from Youtube to Amazon to Digg. Systems that promote content based on user ratings are sometimes said to exploit the "wisdom of the crowd."

But do you trust the ratings? Perhaps I got my friends to rate my book or restaurant highly. This leads us to systems for rating people, reputation systems. Consider, for example, the reputation system at StackOverflow, a programmer question and answer site. Reputation points are awarded for asking good questions and giving good answers, as determined by user votes. Click here and scroll down to "reputation" for an explanation of the way points are awarded. As you see, the wisdom of the crowd is being used to rate people. Note also that a user's power, their ability to moderate the site increases as their reputation improves.

Reputation provides status and pride as well as power, and increasing status is a motivation to contribute to a community. StackOverflow users may answer hundreds of questions and Amazon users may review hundreds of books or products in order to increase their status in the community. StackOverflow explicitly recognizes contributions by awarding badges. Amazon ranks reviewers as a function of the number of reviews they write and the degree to which others find them helpful.

(For more on incentives to contribute time and effort and the economic value of those contributions, click here).

But is it really you doing the rating? Can your identity be verified? Can you take your online reputation with you from one Web site to another? Can you take your personal profile with you from one Web site to another? How many times have you entered your name, email address, street address, and perhaps credit card data? People are working to develop online credentials in which you could simply authorize a vendor or other person to access specified entries in an online profile that you control.

OpenID is one step toward a multi-site user-identity system. You register with an OpenID provider you trust, then use that to log into any site that accepts OpenID. For example, I have a blog at Blogger.com. If I use Blogger as my OpenID provider, any site I log into can trust that I am the person who runs my blog.

While many people are working on questions of rating, identity and reputation, there are no widely accepted, standards-based answers today.

uservoice.com

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