Reputation - Portability
Discussion
In an age of non-scarcity of content, trust and reputation become more important filtering agents.
A lot of research is being done to devise interoperable reputation systems that could be ported from one system to another, but is that really possible: are reputations portable?
Excerpts from a discussion at: http://www.unionsquareventures.com/2005/11/are_reputations.html
"If value is shifting to trust then a generalized reputation system could theoretically become the organizing principle behind a large and diverse set of web services. But, Mary Hodder squelched this thread with an important insight about reputations – they are not portable...“you can pull data for reputation from Ebay.... but the thing about the difference between what Tim was talking about, maps, and Ebay's reputation information is that the mapping data makes sense when you pull it out of the system, whereas the reputation data, because Ebay is so skewed, it's such a bizarre social environment"
Microchunking/recombining reputation: "how much value there would be in each person being able to aggregate, authenticate, and use anywhere the elements of their own reputation profile that he/she thinks is best in each particular context. That way, it's not so much that there would be a 'system' for reputation that everyone would try to fit into. Rather, individuals could be free to aggregate and authenticate as much of a broad and deep reputation picture or profile of themselves as they feel would be worthwhile. And, the way we think about it at Opinity, individuals would also be completely welcome to put together multiple reputation profiles of themselves for different contexts, say one for ecommerce, one for professional purposes, one for political or dating or community forum purposes. An eBay rating could be shown in a profile or not as any particular person might deem wise for their purposes. The most important thing is that elements of a reputation profile can be made portable, aggregated, authenticated, and thereby be more useful and worthy of some degree of trust (depending on how broad, deep, and verified the profile is) everywhere on the 'net."
More Information
Trust in Web Based Social Networks. The Trust Project is an examination of issues related to using trust in web based social networks. URL = http://trust.mindswap.org/
iKarma.com
"A small company called Opinity is trying to address this issue by aggregating many different sources of reputation data (ie. eBay rating, credit rating, etc.) to enable sites to interact w/individuals to get the reputation item they need for that trusted interaction to take place."
Check Epinions.com Web of Trust, http://www.epinions.com/help/faq/?show=faq_wot This is a better example of trust networks than Ebay.
All comments above, including the recommendations are from http://www.unionsquareventures.com/2005/11/are_reputations.html