Dean Landolt

I finally found the time to do a little following up on ProjectVRM (if you haven’t heard of it, it’s worth reading up on). Doc Searls has a great article up on VRM and a public commons — or more specifically, a more efficient market for getting support. The general idea is simple, but Doc’s right: “The personal pulpits we call blogs do not a commons make. Nor does any site. eBay is a private marketplace, not a public one.”

But a more more interesting was a comment by Mike Warot describing what he termed a mesh of assertions. Really, it’s not too dissimilar from Slashdot moderation — just decentralized and a lot more extensible. It’s pretty easy to envision a microformat combined with OpenID to make these assertions (gaining adoption’s a whole ‘nother story). The implementation to ‘assert’ nearly any statement could be done inline or with a simple browser extension. Figuring out how to pull off meta-assertions is a little tougher to wrap my head around, but I’m sure it’s doable (even n-level meta-assertions), and this is perhaps where the greatest value in reputation building lies. To my mind, an aggregation of these many mini-assertions is the only way to effective way to build out a flexible, open reputation system.

Reputation is key, and not just that of the creators, but of atomic items, be it a blog comment, a “requst for support”, the replies to the request — anything. It’s these items that should drive a reputation anyway, but such a system wouldn’t completely punish anonymity. Anonymous responses, whatever the reason for the anonymity, can stand on their own merit, sans credit to the creator. It seems to me the success of VRM depends wholly on the creation of this kind of reputation information.

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This entry was posted Sunday, March 11th, 2007 at 11:48 pm and is filed under Business, Technologism. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.