TECHNORATI AS A REPUTATION SYSTEM

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Technorati as a Reputation System

I think that Technorati has the potential to become a great reputation system. In its current form, it reports the number of inbound links and inbound blogs. While simple, this provides a good measure of how these blogs are viewed by others. Sebastien Paquet suggested using this data as a way to filter comments in blogs. Readers would be able to set an "number of inbound blogs" threshold. So if I only value comments from bloggers with 10 inbound blogs, the comment listing would be filtered accordingly. And if I want to see all comments, I can do that to (I think that is important). In another example, today Joi Ito has created a script that displays recent inbound blogs in the sidebar of his blog -- very cool. This brings to mind the potential for many different possibilities. It becomes somewhat of a peer-to-peer reputation system, like saying "here's waht these people are saying about me...and if you don't believe me, click on the link and visit their site so you can read for yourself. And not only that, 'Joe', who thinks I am great, has 100 blogs linking to him, so he has a pretty reputation himself." Another possibility, that I thought of, was inspired by Google's PageRank system. Right now, Technorati treats all links as equal. This works, but a more accurate picture of reputation would take into account the reputation of those who are linking to you. So, if someone with 1000 inbound links makes a link to my blog, that should contribute more to my reputation that someone with zero inbound links. I'm no mathematician, but here is a simple equation that could be used to determine your Cosmos Score: For every link you get from a blog with zero or one inbound blog, you get 1 point. If the blog linking to you has 2 inbound blogs, you get 2 points added to your score, and so on. This gives weighting to your inbound blogs that is proportional to the reputation of those linking to you. Also borrowing from the PageRank scheme, this could be taken a bit farther. If a blog has 1000 inbound blogs, in our current equation, every blog that it links to get 1000 points, whether there are 1 or 100 outbound links. But if a blog with 1000 inbound blogs decides to link to only 10 blogs, isn't that a stronger "reputation vote" that if there were 1000 outbound links. The more outbound links, the value of these reputation votes gets diluted. To account for this, points can be divided by the number of going links. In this example, if the 1000-point blog links only to 10 blogs, each outbound blog would receive 1000 / 10 = 100 incremental points to their Cosmos score. Finally, scripts like Ito's could be used to display your score on your page, and becuase Technorati updates links so fast, your score would change as soon as links are created. The real power in this, in my opinion, would be for a similar marketplace reputation system, a strong basis for a new social marketplace.

Posted by Mark at May 11, 2003 10:47 AM | TrackBack