Weblog on the Internet and public policy, journalism, virtual community, and more from David Brake, a Canadian academic, consultant and journalist
31 January 2003

Howard Rheingold posts about Affero – a new open source reputation tracking scheme that lets people indicate that they like or dislike what you have posted or even pay you or your favourite charity money.

The thing about it that is interesting to me is that, “the system doesn’t come bundled with any particular forum or community platform, so any independent community host can integrate the services and individuals can share reputation across various communities.”

Of course this has its good and bad points as I discussed the other day at an e-mint meeting. It means your reputation is consistent which could keep known creeps from polluting new communities. On the other hand, it makes it harder to rehabilitate yourself if for some reason you make yourself very unpopular in one particular context. Some people are very un-helpful in one context (they’re a raving right-winger, say) but in another context (offering tech support) they may be really valuable participants. This calls for “multi-dimensional” whuffie.

We’re still at the early stages of handling online reputation but it is encouraging that these experiments are happening.

Needless to say I have registered so if you like this weblog, you can rate it by clicking here.

No Comments

No comments yet.

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URL

Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.