Arbitrage

Reputation Riddle

If a reputation falls in a forest but no one is within earshot...the story of Wellsphere and Ron Gutman is an interesting anecdote in the evolving reputation conversation.

You can learn about the demise of the Web 2.0 venture Wellsphere on Uncov and observe the severe reputation issues faced by Wellsphere CEO Ron Gutman in TechCrunch comments - but these are obscure sources of information. Searching Google or Spock for Ron Gutman yields very little useful information related to the controversy around Wellspehere.  There should be a more accessible/scanable method of assessing reputation - especially for entrepreneurs/CEOs. This is not to say that Techcrunch comments or Uncov are definitive/comprehensive sources - but they do provide data points to the reputation picture for Ron Gutman and that picture should be easier to sketch out than it currently is.

Reputation Startup Survey: RapLeaf, BuzzLogic, Reputica, Gleamd

I'm still looking at the current state of online reputation and came across a number of interesting startups. Each of these companies is approaching reputation from a slightly different angle - which shows the varied concerns emerging around the explosion of online content that can impact identity and reputation. Not all of these companies would classify themselves as providing a reputation app, but they are all based on the concept of analyzing identity data across multiple content sources online - which is how I define a reputation app.

RapLeaf is a startup focused on reputation as it pertains to online transactions - think of opening eBay's reputation system to the wider internet. In the social community context, how reliable an online vendor a person is just one facet of their broader reputation, but RapLeaf is interesting in the sense that is seeks to capture and grade reputation as an abstract. Also interesting that eBay bans links to RapLeaf on seller profiles.

BuzzLogic is focused on reputation from a PR and influence perspective. They run detailed reports and crunch statistics seeking to assess from a numbers perspective who is influential in social media communities. 

Reputica is an online service that is positioned for people and companies that are fearful that their reputations can be damaged by information posted in social media sites. It is essentially an alarm detection service for reputation.

Gleamd is a site that is basically a Digg for people. Gleamd users post a short bio and other users vote on the bio. The end result is a scoring/ranking system for people based on their online reputation. Gleamd relies on user participation and in so doing brings.

So much data is out there and more is coming online every minute. The old debates about whether to aggregate user data or leave it in silos are increasingly irrelevant in light of reputation tools like these which can mine, scan, and report on data  sourced everywhere.

Reputation

if i told you things i did before
told you how i used to be
would you go along with someone like me

if you knew my story word for word
had all of my history
would you go along with someone like me

-Young Folks, Peter, Bjorn, and John

The mainstreaming of blogging and social community participation in combination with search engines optimized to turn up people data  is creating an online environment where we can effectively assess many people's stories word for word from multiple sources. The result: the significant conversation around reputation on the internet will trend away from community specific reputation local to sites like eBay and Slashdot - and towards a broader notion of online reputation that encompasses all of the different facets of a persons identity that are now scanable/searchable.

Note: Hat tip to Bill Gurley for promulgating the start your post off with lyrics model.

For the curious, Young Folks video:

Analog Flashback - ON TV

Would you pay $60 per month for one extra TV channel? The monthly charge for ON TV in LA in 1977 was $19 - which would be around $60 a month in today's dollars. What did you get for your 60 bucks? - One extra movie channel -and in LA ON also carried Laker and Dodger home games.  So in 2007 terms, ON was charging $2 per day per channel - in comparison DirecTv currently charges roughly $0.01 per day per channel.

The ON-TV receiver was a big black box with a dial that had two settings "Off" and...wait for it..."ON".  The ON box hooked up to the UHF jack in the back of the television (Phillips head screw driver required) and there was a specialized antenna that needed to be installed on the roof as well. When you wanted to watch ON - you turned the TV to U and flipped the knob on the box to ON - good times.

My family actually subscribed to ON back in the dark days before cable. I will have to give my dad a hard time next time I see him over the economics - the baby boomers really had no concept of the value of televised entertainment.

Finding Content via Facebook, LinkedIn

Jeremiah Owyang in his recent post on the identity implications of Facebook asks:

"...will we rely on personal social network features (what do my friends think and recommend) over search?"

I think the answer is unquestionably yes - getting recommendations, information, news, etc is a function that is deeply embedded in carbon based social interactions and it will be a model that takes over online. I'm still very new to Facebook, but it is already an excellent source of new content flow and I imagine it will only increase in value as a pointer platform.

The questions feature in LinkedIn also provides an example of how access to content can be mediated by/through a social network.

I recently posted a question regarding mortgage brokers to LinkedIn and quickly received a number of useful responses. Those responses represent a "search result" that is delivered via an established social network  and I'm sure results delivered this way will be more useful and harder to game than machine generated algorithms. 

More important, the content that comes through a social network is inherently more operational.  Take a look at the search results for "mortgage broker" in Google - what's your next step from that page? The process of triaging Google results for a worthwhile lead is painful

It is very difficult to assess credibility and quality in Google results and that is the opportunity for social communities to become a primary source of content  - especially for the mass market of Internet users.

OpenId.org and Steven Livingstone

One of the reasons identity management exists at all is because people do creepy things. In this case, Steven Livingstone is doing something creepy and opportunistic but legal by re-purposing openid.org. Of course, since his name is associated with the bamboozlement - he's probably harmed his reputation in ways that he'll pay for as long as people search Google, or LinkedIn, or Spock to check on someones reputation before doing business with them, hiring them, etc. One benefit of the new new transparency is that this type of public bad behavior punishes itself - and therefore there will be an increasingly strong disincentive to act in ways that will gouge your reputation.

Preference Mining

So, I really like the way iConcertCal works. It creates a calendar of events that I am likely to be interested in by reading in the bands in my iTunes Library and running the list against a number of upcoming concert feeds. I call this Preference Mining.

Although I started off with no explicit intention of creating a definitive store for my music tastes in iTunes, over time and regular usage my iTunes music library has come to represent a repository of my musical tastes - iConcentCal comes in after the fact and scans the repository and based on my preferences for music and without any additional input from me populates a really useful calendar.

Note, it does not recommend new bands I might like based on my library (which is good since recommending music is not a task well performed via algorithm).

iConcertCal looks at accumulated data and presents something concrete that correlates directly to the  accumulated data and in doing so extracts real value (in the form of time savings and entertainment) from the data.

The way iConcertCal works has me thinking of other places I have been accumulating preference data:

Amazon (obvious)
Tivo
In databases at Visa, Mastercard, and Amex
OPML
Bookmarks
and seriously in Quicken.

I'm sure there is a longer,smarter list, but that's mine for this post.

Preference Mining in Quicken - is there an API that would allow that? My OPML file might be an easier place to start.

Facebook's Pointer Platform

I'm lame and over 30 and only recently joined Facebook, so I'm just getting up to speed and building out my friend network - but even as an FB embryo, the value created by having a central site where friends point out new apps, sites, info, groups, discussions, events, music, books, etc, is obvious.

The internet experience mediated and navigated by a vast collaboration/conspiracy of friends - that is the meaning of Facebook.

Jason Calacanis' explicitly friendly Mahalo (it's "there to help") search service fits the same pattern for me.

Plaxo and OpenID

The beta of Plaxo 3.0 supports login via OpenID. Kinda cool, but SSO and auto-registration are not the primary identity challenges with social networks and communities. To really pimp the unicycle, someone  needs to figure out how to apply OpenID to help solve friend discovery, community bootstrapping, friend portability, etc.

Dave Winer - Why We Fight

Dave Winer says we go to war because it is profitable.  Take a look at Halliburton's 5 year chart and draw your own conclusions: