A few days ago I was excited to find that Eugene Eric Kim had posted about a conversation we’d had (when I apparently ambushed him) at the last Internet Identity Workshop in Mountain View in December. I love it when people who write well make me sound smart.
What was he doing that I found so compelling? It was his Ph.D. research on ContextualAuthorityTagging. The basis of the idea is simple: The best way to identify an authority on a topic is not to ask people to self-identify themselves as such, but to ask others to identify the people they consider to be the authorities. We can leverage this principle to locate expertise by building tagging systems where users tag other users with information about their expertise. (LWT)
Terrell has thought really deeply about this, and several of his ideas are documented at his website and on his blog. PhilWindley and DavidWeinberger have also commented on his work. (LWU)
I heard more original ideas about tagging in that 20 minutes of conversation than I’ve ever heard from anyone else. The one that really struck me was the notion of tag disparities: comparing what people say about you to what you say about yourself as a way of measuring reputation. Sound familiar? It’s a real-life instantiation of the SquirmTest! (LWV)
And then, Aldo Castañeda at The Story of Digital Identity (STODID) contacted me to talk about my work. We spoke last week and he’s posted the podcast this morning.
Episode #55 is live and the direct link is here. It’s just over 36 minutes long.
I also wanted to share that I’ll be in Austin this next week for SXSWi – so please send me a note if you want to talk and/or get a very cool claimID button.
Tags: aldo - claimID - eekim - iiw2006b - PowerOfMany - stodid - sxsw2007
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