Terrell Russell: This Old Network

More noise for a distributed, contextual-based reputation system by Jeff Nolan…

Two seemingly unconnected events caught my attention over the last week and it was only this morning that I put them together. The first is the now well covered Photo’chopped photos that Reuters carried and then retracted, and the second was the less known case of Kevin Corazza v. Kris Krug. [on Flickr]

and he concludes…

My prediction is that reputation systems of all kinds will increasingly become a focus for anything in the public view, and they will rely on techniques that capture the power of community to derive trust rather than a brand manufacturing it.

We are moving quickly towards a time and technology where distributed, calculable reputation is available. We’ll be able to query our network about a person or company and see their public reputation score, their public-facing history laid out in contextually relevant and timely, localized, helpful clarity.

We’ll be leaving trails wherever we go and with whomever we interact. Our history will play a role in our future, more so than ever before. The shadow of the future will loom larger than it ever has.

Today, our networks are divided, our personas are separate. We can, as long as we’re obscure and not famous enough to note, morph and change who we are. We can pick up and move to a different state – a different city, and become a new person – to a point. We are tied to our physicality. But this is less true today than even a few decades ago, and it will continue to become less true as we move forward.

None of this analysis is new, but it’s becoming increasingly obvious as the science fiction of just a few years ago is now very much a case of current events.

Tags: distributed - PowerOfMany - reputation

After a week or so of hushed discussion, I’m pleased to announce claimID’s involvement in the bounty process for OpenID development…

This is our official announcement on the claimID blog:

ClaimID proudly announces it has joined a consortium of ten forward-thinking companies to fund the development and adoption of OpenID. ClaimID utilizes OpenID, a standards-based identity protocol; it lets you do cool stuff like log into LiveJournal or Wikipedia (very soon!) with your claimID URL. Not only is that cool, it just makes sense – OpenID is decentralized, scalable, easy-to-use and it saves you from having to create new accounts at every site you log into.

Announced by JanRain CEO Scott Kveton at OSCON, the consortium’s first project is an OpenID code bounty. The consortium will offer $5,000 to ten open source projects that successfully implement OpenID. I know what you’re thinking – “$5,000 to implement OpenID – sign me up!” Well, there are a few conditions. Your project must be OSI licensed, and there must be either 5,000 downloads a month or 200,000 users of publicly installed instances. Software like WordPress, phpBB, Drupal or Joomla are great examples – and you can suggest others. Not only will each of these projects be getting $5,000, but they will also be investing in the future of identity, and making it easier for people to use their projects. It is a win-win all around.

The consortium is made up of forward-thinking companies that share a goal to make identity better on the net. They are Verisign, JanRain, Cordance, ooTao, Opinity, Four Kitchen Studios, Zooomr, NetMesh, Sxip and claimID. We’re looking to expand our consortium, so if you’re interested in supporting this important cause, please contact us. The coordinating site, located at http://iwantmyOpenID.com, and bounty program were organized by the OpenID community.

We’re so happy to be able to take part in this very important goal. We feel that OpenID is great way to give people the identity solutions they need. With this bounty program and consortium, we hope that people will take this opportunity to collaborate, converse and compromise. We’re convinced we’ve made a great decision in supporting OpenID, its community and this consortium, and we look forward to the important progress this initiative will make.

Big news indeed. This is very exciting – I’ve only been working in the identity space with real code for about six months, but only a few minutes after hearing about OpenID, I got it. It made sense.

If we can get that few minutes to happen for more people, through open source software, all the better. This is a first step to much more powerful applications. It will help bring our social connections and trust into the online arena with grace and beauty.

Meanwhile… Brian Ellin sees a giant snowball causing an identity earthquake (a mixed metaphor, but who cares!):

Imagine a snowball teetering, getting ready to roll down the mountain. With a little push to get it going, that ball could turn into something really huge. Something disruptive.

Announcing the OpenID code bounty. $5,000 to ten popular open source projects who implement OpenID in their applications. Announced this morning at OSCON, and the word is already spreading:

• iwantmyopenid.org – bounty homepage
• Kveton on the code bounty
  
• ClaimID on joining the consortium
• Johannes Ernst talking about the bounty
• other blogs talking about the bounty at technorati

Spread the word.

Tags: claimID - janrain - OpenID - oscon - verisign

via Chris Anderson at The Long Tail via Steve Rubel at Micro Persuasion:

Wikipedia has added RSS feeds to the 1.25 million entries in the encyclopedia. This means you can now more easily track the revision history for important articles, such as those about people, brands or corporations. Simply click on the history link at the top of any entry page and you will see the RSS link on the left hand side. Here’s the feed for the ever-popular podcasting page.

This is a very interesting and very powerful. Wikipedia is arguably the single point of aggregated knowledge with the most active participants anywhere on the planet. The fact that those participants can now, a little more passively, keep up with the topics that most interest them is truly ripe with potential.

One of the OneTrueWiki’s greatest strengths and points of the most contention is that anyone can edit the content at any time. The resource that so many people are linking to and citing now as vetted fact can be changed by anyone – horror of horrors!

What is left from these discussions oftentimes is that there are a great number of watchers who see every change made to an article and swoop in with great fervor to defend the honor and NPOV of their joint creation.

To help complete the feedback loop of content creation and policing via RSS, I propose Wikipedia publish, Feedburner style, the number of subscribers to each Wikipedia article (bandwidth and CPU cycles notwithstanding). This will perhaps give more pause to those edits of inconsequence, the toes in the water of community edited content.

There is a potential downside to publishing these numbers though. Knowing how many people are watching your actions is a great catalyst – either for subtlely and rational good behavior, or for rash inflated headline-grabbing stupidity. I think the full information loop of disclosed RSS readership outweighs the potential for rashness though – let the masses use their power for good.

And they even render well in my newsreader – bonus!

Tags: PowerOfMany - rss - wikipedia

Phil Windley, computer science professor at BYU and author of the O’Reilly book “Digital Identity”, writes today about his latest paper submission “A Framework for Building Reputation Systems“.

He makes a point about global identity identifiers (OpenID, LID, i-names, etc.) being capable of allowing “cross-context reputation systems to emerge”.

I think he’s right on – and I’ve been working on some plans for one of these systems over the last few weeks.

I think a distributed system built on the DNS and existing URL-based identifiers is the key and hope to show that a subjective, individualized opinion about someone can be collectively tabulated and measured in a meaningful way. I’ve been most impressed with Dr. Windley’s work. This recent paper is something new and should generate rich discussion and inspiration.

This work is directly related to the great discussion generated at the Identity Mash-Up in Boston in June put on by the Berkman Center at Harvard. A third day open-space discussion at the MIT Media Lab named The Laws of Reputation led directly to the principles in the paper. Go OpenSpace! I was not in the room as I was fixing a bug in claimID with Brian Ellin that 45 minutes. Blasted productive OpenSpace!

Tags: brianellin - identity - OpenID - reputation - windley

In my last post, I wrote about Liz Lawley’s short piece concerning anonymity in review sites concerning teachers and students. She also posed the question of checks and balances in these systems.

The checks and balances needed in these systems are straightforward. They fall out of the required list of elements for a review system to be successful.

1. Require a verified reviewer – Whatever this means in context. Over time we will see OpenID being used to build these systems and identities can be used across systems and potentially aggregated. For now, the walled garden is probably the de facto standard – but that is changing. Systems should definitely not allow anonymous comments to have the same ‘weight’ in whatever scoring or rating system is put in place. Perhaps a side area for anonymous chatter that fades quickly from view.
2. Require a comment/rating – This really does require full text for full explanation and context, everything else is too simple. However, that being said, a simple Lykert scale for a few attributes makes available the generation of statistics and otherwise easier analysis – full text is much harder to count (but much richer).
3. Require a reviewee – The item being reviewed should be a unique entity in the system. For systems where the reviewee is actually a person, and not an event or location or album, the reviewee should be a first class entity as well – able to leave their own feedback and comments/reviews. Here is where the power lies for future development.
4. Make available notifications for all parties involved – This is probably the most important. There should always remain the potential for further conversation about any review/rating. The system should assist in that regard – removing any/all barriers to further discussion and digging to the real facts and circumstances. RSS, email (opt-in or otherwise) should always be made available to all parties; reviewer, reviewee and others.
5. Administrators of the system should always have the right to remove – Probably the most contentious point, but necessary. The administrators should always reserve the right to edit what is said in the system, assuming it’s held in a single place and arguably a full record of what was edited. With a distributed system, this is nigh impossible, but we haven’t seen any like that yet. Distributed systems change the calculus dramatically for all elements of reputation, so this is a fair concession at this point in time.

All systems of this type benefit from the network effects they can generate. The value in the network definitely follows Metcalfe’s Law as the utility of any review area will be significantly greater the greater number of users and reviews posted. It might go without saying, then, that none of the above pieces really matter if you don’t have a proper threshold of activity. The long tail of networks doesn’t win in this regard. Only the big part of the curve gets to play this game today if the goal of the site is global significance (eBay, Amazon, etc.). If a network you are building has a lower bar for success (only your friends, or your school/job), then success can be reached much more easily with less users and activity.

Tags: lawley - metcalfe - rating - reputation