1.8. Reputation on the Web

Over the centuries, as human societies became increasingly mobile, people started bumping into one another. Increasingly, we began to interact with complete strangers and our locally acquired knowledge became inadequate for evaluating the trustworthiness of new trading partners and goods. The emergence of various formal and informal reputation systems was necessary and inevitable. These same problems of trust and evaluation are with us today, on the Web. Only…more so. The Web has no centralized history of reputable transactions and no universal identity model. So we can’t simply mimic real-world reputation techniques, where once you find someone (or some group) that you trust in one context, you can transfer that trust to another. On the Web, no one knows who you are, or what you’ve done in the past. There is no multi-context "reputation at large" for users of the Web, at least for the vast majority of users.

Consider what people today are doing online. Popular social media sites are the product of millions of hands and minds. Around the clock and around the globe, the world is pumping out contributions small and large: full-length features on Vimeo, video shorts on YouTube, entries on Blogger, discussions on Yahoo! Groups, and tagged-and-titled Del.icio.us bookmarks. User-generated content and robust crowd participation have become the hallmarks of Web 2.0.