

Docs Are Old-School, We Need PageRank for People - dnewcome
http://threeminds.organic.com/2009/06/docs_are_old-school_we_need_pa.html

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old-gregg
"PeopleRank" he's suggesting is good for jut two very special kinds of
individuals.

First group is public figures and marketing people. Visibility and being
relevant means everything to them. But even these folks often maintain dual
personality life i.e. public/true versions of themselves. Some smarter
programming contractors also fall into this category, although they prefer to
call themselves "consultants" presumably because it lacks an unwanted
association with plumbers, roofers and other contract workers of "lesser
glamour".

The second group is pretty much "first group wannabes", i.e. highly social
individuals crying for more attention. Most blogging programmers fall into
this category, i.e. folks who (instead of actually coding) can spend an
evening writing a post on something as pointless/dumb as "RDBMS is obsolete"
prettying it up with irrelevant photos of random objects. No, they aren't any
more "experts in AJAX" than folks who don't blog, they just want attention.

But most of us don't belong to either of these two groups. When I attended the
startup school last year I met about 50 different HN folks, and most of them
have never posted anything here, let alone using their real name. "PeopleRank"
would only anger them, I suppose.

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pudo
While you are probably right in identifying these two groups as very intense
users of such a system, I would argue that they would not be its typical users
but rather the people most likely to abuse it.

This has to do with the concept of "personal online reputation", which is
often used as a weasel word for "stuff people will find when they google you".
This, of course, is something you can easily influence and leads to a form of
digital masturbation that I am highly critical of.

If, otoh, you use a more scientific definition, e.g. "the aggregate of all
opinions of _other_ people that have interacted with your previously and that
are available in a given social network", this becomes a very interesting
measure. And one that is incredibly hard to work with.

But, assuming that someone figured out how to handle it, it would be
incredibly useful: it would allow for ad-hoc trustful pseudonymous
interactions both in situations like the current struggle in Iran, where
certain pseudonyms could quickly gather domain-specific reputation and thus
become effective gate keepers. The value of such a mechanism extends through
all forms of online cooperative services and could be extremely valuable in
fighting trolls, griefers etc.

Another potential use of this is around privacy: While I believe that we need
to find many new (social and legal) norms regarding the handling of personally
identifying information in the web, I also think that we will have to develop
a generation of post-privacy tools that will help us deal with data that has
leaked and will never be re-secured. Creating multi-faceted, rich online
identities might be such a tool.

These scenarios will be interesting to more users than just marketing
professionals and wannabes, although it is likely that the new discipline of
reputation corruption will grow right alongside with these tools.

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natch
This is a very old idea. It's been given various names: FriendRank,
PeopleRank, PersonRank -- many, many hits on Google.

~~~
10ren
Also "web of trust"

~~~
twopoint718
I was thinking the same thing. Having a chain of signed PGP keys that allow
you to infer the trustworthiness of someone hasn't seemed to catch on. Are
there any good articles on how this idea developed, and succeeded and or
failed (I'm sure it was/is in very heavy use somewhere or among some group)?
Heck I once went to a signing party...
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_signing_party>

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leecho0
I think he brings up a good point, but I have serious doubts about google
using it because of privacy issues.

What he suggests is that there is a ranking for each person in the world, and
the content he creates will be ranked higher in the world. Merely tracking the
same author could either be an invasion of privacy -- tracking the ip and/or
taking a peek at the person's cookie, or ridiculously hard -- analyzing
usernames, vocabulary, tone of voice, etc.

He mentioned doing something special with openid, but it would need widespread
adoption before this could be done.

