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"On Karma: Top-line Lessons on User Reputation Design In Building Web Reputation Systems, we appropriate the term karma to mean a user reputation in an online service. As you might expect, karma is discussed heavily throughout the more than 300 pages. During the final editing process, it became clear that a simple summary of the main points would be helpful to those looking for guidance. It seemed that our first post in over a month (congratulations on the new delivery, Bryce!) should be something big and useful... This post covers the following top-line points about designing karma systems, drawn from our book and other blog posts: * Karma is user reputation within a context * Karma is useful for building trust between users, and between a user and the site * Karma can be an incentive for participation and contributions * Karma is contextual and has limited utility globally. [A chessmaster is not a good eBay Seller] * Karma comes in several flavors - Participation, Quality and Robust (combined) * Karma should be complex and the result of indirect evaluations, and the formulation is often opaque * Personal karma is displayed only to the owner, and is good for measuring progress * Corporate karma is used by the site operator to find the very best and very worst users * Public karma is displayed to other users, which is what makes it the hardest to get right * Public karma should be used sparingly - it is hard to understand, isn't expected, and is easily confused with content ratings * Negative public karma should be avoided all together. In karma-math -1 is not the same magnitude as +1, and information loss is too expensive. * Public karma often encourages competitive behavior in users, which may not be compatible with their motivations. This is most easily seen with leaderboards, but can happen any time karma scores are prominently displayed. [i.e.: Twitter follower count] "

"\nIn a recent interview with EMC's Stu Miniman about the future of the web, I predicted that in 20 years, we'll all have online reputation scores. Little badges, numbers that communicate our level of authority, this sort of thing. And these reputations will have tangible impact.\n\nThree different trends come together at some point in the future to make this happen. These trends have been underway for a while, but come together at some tipping point in the years ahead. Here's a visualization of the trends:"

"Third, we learn some cool things about how Aardvark works. Check this quote out: "...unlike quality scores like PageRank [13], Aardvark's quality score aims to measure intimacy rather than authority. And unlike the relevance scores in corpus-based search Screen shot 2010-02-02 at 5.57.33 PM.png engines, Aardvark's relevance score aims to measure a user's potential to answer a query, rather than a document's existing capability to answer a query." Also interesting: " this involves modeling a user as a content- generator, with probabilities indicating the likelihood she will likely respond to questions about given topics. Each topic in a user profile has an associated score, depending upon the confidence appropriate to the source of the topic. In addition, Aardvark learns over time which topics not to send a user questions about...""

Look at what we're doing with 'reputation!' Whatever it turns out to be, I think it's amazing! I've never met any people on our list! Amazing!

haven't read yet, but Intimacy is a different dimVal than Reputation - related of course, and it has nothing to do with haptic body suits, though I suppose that would be a different type of Reward - looks interesting, off to scrounge around

I think they are referring more to the kind of question. A query like "who is the oldest living American president?" is best suited for a Library paradigm, whereas a question like "is the current president of the US doing a good job in repairing the economy?" is really more of a village paradigm. I most likely will 'trust' the library answer on the first one, but will probably become en-snarled in endless debate with my Village on the second. The point is I think, that more and more, people are asking questions that the traditional library of knowledge cannot effectively answer, even with functional semantics in place. Long live The Village. Now, who IS Number 6?