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A PROBLEM WITH LINK-BASED REPUTATION SYSTEMS



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Mark







PostPosted: June 16, 2003 11:37 PM 
Generally, the more links that a site (or blog) gets can be used a measure of the importance of the site in question. Links are one type of vote for the site's reputation (see my previous post about Technorati as a reputation system). One problem with this is that we sometimes link to things that we don't like. Sometimes we link to things to express our disagreement, anger, or outrage. These types of links really should detract from the reputation of the site in question -- but how can a link-based reputation system tell the difference between a good link and a bad link? Humans can do this, by reading the adjacent text and making a subjective determination as to the authors opinion of the link destination. Is it possible to design an automated reputation system, that can understand the semantics of a link and its surrounding text? I suppose such a system could attempt to achieve this by spidering the text and scanning for known positive and negative words, and, considering the proximity of those words to the link itself, calculate a probability that the link has a postive (thus increasing reputation) or negative (thus decreasing reputation) intent. I guess you could take this concept a step further and assign a -10 to +10 reputation weighting to every link. I wonder how close such a system would come to the human interpretation of link-reputation intent.
Mark Thristan
PostPosted: June 18, 2003 7:39 AM 

Link value is one useful value judgement, and by looking at this in tiers (ie. links from a site which in turn has a high number of inward links), additional benefits can be gained from this.
The problem is that many of the other strategies that we, as humans, use to make value judgements are not necessarily appropriate for machine systems. If "Rate this page" style apps were rolled out across the Web, maybe these values could be combined with link currency to come up with a more accurate "value" judgement. The other problem is that there are a number of granular audiences among web users - what is of value to one may not be of value to others.I've put up a few comments about reputation and trust called Trust Networks on this.
Mark Carey
PostPosted: June 18, 2003 9:39 AM 

Mark, I agree, the ultimate ideal in value or reputation systems would be a personal one, in which the value of something is measures based on the things/values/opinions that are important to me. This concept has also been discussed for search technologies -- search engines that detrermine relevancy (at least in part) based on some information about the searcher. Btw, your link isn't working...
Mark Thristan
PostPosted: June 19, 2003 12:11 PM 

Try this for Trust Networks - my permalinks seem not to be functioning! I also bunged together a bit on Weblogs: dynamics and value that's kind of related. (NB: I've checked these links before including them)

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