I’ve been more and more thinking on Internet Reputation possibilities since I read Michael Arrington’s blog entry in his List of Companies I’d Like to Profile and thought I’d share some of my thoughts here - which probably just summarize various articles on the topic available on the net.

Reputations are relative.

Reputations are contextual.

You shouldn’t have to visit a separate site or use a special username to modify your reputation - you don’t do this in real life, it should be part of the experience.

Any site that wants to integrate reputation management/inclusion into their site should be able to do so via an easy to use, open API.

Going through the available newcomers - iKarma and Opinity, I see things they’re doing right, and things that are just off.. likely to allow for their business model to work.

I wasn’t a fan of iKarma when I ran through their tour and created an account, and the fact that a score was a simple percentage and star rating was almost too simple. When you think of your friends and if you’d want to do business with them or play a game with them, those ‘reputations’ aren’t the same and really don’t have a lot to do with each other, rather, their reputation is contextual. Someone could be great to play online games with, but terrible when it comes to shipping out a product, or trading something. This is where I think Opinity has the solution partly right - they’ve defined categories (contexts) where reputations can differ without affecting each other to any large degree - Community, Dating, Gaming, Commerce are the big ones there. They also allow for tagging which gives people another level on which to define the context of the reputation above and beyond their rigidly defined contexts. The integration of existing sites with Opinity is also another of its strengths, I’d love to know how they’re obtaining the Ebay reputation metrics.

But back to the relativity of reputations. On top of individual users having reputations relative to each other, the sources of those reputations might also be scored in some fashion as to the reputation of the site itself. ie. Would you weigh incoming reputation from Ebay the same as you would from someone’s random blog? Probably not, so there needs to be some mechanism for sources to be integrated into that contextual reputation calculation. Given that each user of the API

We’re working on an Open API to fill this niche at Voxxia, and hope to have an alpha release out within the next month or so. We’re thinking of offering code samples in PHP, .NET and possibly Java to start. Developer API tokens will also be used to manage bandwidth and the potential for spamming (this is where source reputation will be very valuable).