Reputation Everywhere – Jack Vinson

I really liked a recent post by Jack Vinson on Reputation everywhere or the growth of web based rating systems. He said that even Quicken, his personal finance system asks for ratings on vendors. He also mentions Epinions that lets individuals rate products they've purchased and links to any online vendors (and ratings of those vendors). Google builds its search on reputation as defined in large part by who links to whom and thus it favors blogs with high traffic and many inward links.

Menupalace covers Toronto restaurants and other venues. It has a forum where people can submit reviews. This is common on many food sites and travel sites. The wisdom of crowds is profilerating. I am sure there are attempts to game this system and when the crowd is small, the results can be more easily gamed or biased by a few. Rotten Tomatoes also you to rate movies. Newsvine allows you to rate news stories.

What’s next? Will the US Internal Revenue System ask us to rate the service providers whose services we deduct? Will the HMO ask for rating of health care providers? They may already. Digital technology makes all this much easier to do. What do you want to rate today?

Comments

[Jozef Imrich]

Hi Bill,

I thought I might share a few links one in terms of S(i)x degrees of reputation: Charles McGrath, former editor of the New York Times Book Review recently posed the rhetorical question: “has there ever been a book that wasn’t acclaimed?” All the books are above average ... Six degrees of reputation: The use and abuse of online review and recommendation systems by Shay David and Trevor Pinch
http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue11_3/david/index.html Why look at book reviews?

Speaking of reputation: on the web one must develop thick skin and short memory or else ... As Friedrich Nietzsche noted: What does not kill you makes you stronger!

Another Idea for Amazon

Jozef Imrich who wrote a wonderful, gripping true story of his escape from Communist held Czechoslovakia called Cold River just left a Comment on my recent why Amazon Should Blog post made mention of the pain that bad reviews on Amazon cause. That gave me an idea.

Amazon could allow authors to respond to reviews. That would create a person dialog and be fascinating to follow. It also might do something Amazon's Connect, it's author blog does not yet do--it could join the overall conversation of the blogosphere.

Sorry, I can't tell you how that would impact ROI, but I bet it would be more positive than negative.
http://redcouch.typepad.com/weblog/2006/03/another_idea_fo.html

Web is the way forward for Bloomsbury
By Stephen Seawright (Filed: 04/04/2006)

Bloomsbury, the publisher renowned for the Harry Potter novels, has started making books available to download from its website as it predicted up to half of all fiction sales could be made this way within 10 years.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml?xml=/money/2006/04/04/ubloom.xml&sSheet=/money/2006/04/04/ixcitytop.html

PS: Visits to blogs, local information and social networks drive Web growth
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/03/AR2006040301692.html ">New Trends In Online Traffic

[John T. Maloney]

Bill --

It is good to see reputation, crowd wisdom and information markets getting the attention they deserve, particularly from the business, govt and institutional communities. (They have been a white hot academic topic for years, and still are.)

Cass R. Sunstein's new book, Infotopia, How Many Minds Produce Knowledge, explores methods for aggregating information; it contains discussions of prediction markets, open source software, and wikis.

Cass is the keynote at the non-commercial Chicago Cluster on June 7, 2006. See:

http://www.pmcluster.com/CHI.htm

This is a pre-launch for Infotopia. All participants rcv a copy. (It is not published yet.)

Here are some excellent compilations of this exploding space.

Description & Analysis of Information Markets (Witten/Herdecke University) : http://tinyurl.com/hf93w

Information Markets: A New Way of Making Decisions (AEI - Brookings): http://www.pmcluster.com/IM.pdf

-j
http://kmblogs.com/

[panasianbiz]

I stumbled across your blog while I was doing some online research. I personally prefer to shop and buy only when I've read user reviews, so I appreciate this info!