Akkam’s Razor

I’ve been reflecting how trust works on the internet, and specifically the blogosphere.When people discuss ‘trusted computing’ online, it’s usually in terms of ‘being ‘an authenticated user, meaning that they are who they say they are.  Since much of the activity online is either anonymously (although no one is ever truly anonymous) or pseudonomous, then  reputation is based on what you do (or don’t do) and what you contribute to your given group.

To quickly sum up what this means, here are some of the reputation metrics that I scribbled down:

• eBay:  As a buyer and a seller, your reputation is customer/vendor reported based on the accuracy of your statements and the promptness of your payments.  It is desirable to have many transaction with good reputation scores.  Think of this as a credit-score for buyers and a ‘Better-Business-Bureau’ seal of approval for sellers.
• del.icio.us: del.icio.us allows you to add people to your network - the size of your network, as in those you follow and those that follow you can be an indication of your reach and inclusion in the community.  By adding people you know or people who you feel bookmark items of value, you have a very powerful way to aggregate a zeitgeist of great bookmarks.
• Subscribers to a given blog’s feed:  (Feeds are truncated syndicated streams of the blogs material, suited for display in lo-fi devices such as cellphones and PDAs, or in web app ‘feedreaders’ such as Bloglines or Google Reader).  Some of the feed services, such as Feedburner allow a ‘chicklet‘ (a small graphic) with the number of subscribers in it.  Since the majority of blogs has ‘a’ reader - the publisher, those with more are infinitely more popular.  Some blogs have 10-100k’s of readers.
• Google Page Rank:  Google has an algorithim that measures the relative importance of pages in their index, on a scale of 0-10.  The higher the rank, the higher that site appears in the index - given that browser behavior indicates that most searcher give up after the third pages of results, the higher one is in the index, the better.  Also, for those that run advertising, higher Page Rank generally means higher advertising revenue.
• Google Reader:  Google has recently made it possible to total up how many items have been ’starred’ or ’shared’, indicating the value the reader places on them, raising the visibility and presumed merit of those posted items.
• Facebook:  Commenting on your friends ‘walls’ (a message board-like feature) and having an appropriate number of friends conveys some sort of status - too many or too few is perceived negatively.
• Technorati Authority:  Technorati is a blog indexing service (previously very popular, however, they have recently lost a lot of relevance, particularly by only focusing on a limited period versus in-perpetuity) that measures the number of links IN and OUT from a site/blog to other sites/blogs.  Basically the more people link to yo, the better, with your links being important if there are reciprocal links back to your site.
• Miscellaneous blog-related trust measures:  These could include being listed on someone’s blogroll (a list of read blogs), participations in ‘carnivals’ - a targeted, regular roundup across several blogs on a specific topic, comments on a particular post in a blog, or trackbacks (reciprocal links between blogs) from one blog to another.

The common themes here are popularity, individual participation, accuracy, responsibility, community participation, and reciprocity.  Since credentials are usually omitted, obscured, or unverifiable, you are usually represented by your efforts and ideas, and not by your pedigree or achievements.  I’m wondering where and how this will manifest in regards to closed collaborative systems where the partticipants have a specific shared reason to be there and generally know of each other (but not knowing each other personally) as opposed to an open ‘drop-in’ collaborative system like the blogosphere…