Monday, March 17, 2008

Reputation

I have been curious to learn about sites with "currency" based on user's reputations (e.g. ebay or expert forums) since we've not yet covered this topic in depth. I found a good Trust Reputation Systems Survey presentation referenced by a Middleware class at BYU. The presentation describes how different online commercial services and expert forums compute user's reputations, and the various challenges facing such efforts. I was a little surprised to see this was part of an Internet middleware class, but on second thought it makes sense that peer-to-peer and other connected computing systems are built upon a reputation framework.

The course itself is in progress, but there are still a variety of useful references to reputation or trust-based systems on their course calendar page.

1 comment:

Justin said...

The hard part, and most crucial IMHO, is designing the system so that breaking the rules (cheating) is not in your best interests. But such is the study of game theory...