(SOURCE:"escapablel")-
Wow another Britt must read! Here are some juicy excerpts (bold mine!) Go Britt and Ming go!: <QUOTE> Like blogs, kindword/frustration/evaluation comments can be helpful but they share a failing we've discovered about blogs, which is why people are trying to leverage them into knowledge management systems: non-explicit, anecdotal text is quotable but otherwise unusable. Here's a report just in from Jason Calacanis on how his company's venture capital database overtook the previous market leader, which was a blog about venture capital: That is the big lesson I think..
blog + database + research reports = big business, blog plus nothing = a hobby. (author's emphasis) Reputation is too important to be a hobby. ... The operative word is require. A reputation system is worthless if it captures ratings only at the whim of the buyer, or worse, at the whim of participants in a forum, as in this example, where the comments do not necessarily relate to a particular task. They can be too vague to benefit the next customer. Therefore it's imperative to require that a grade and comment be recorded within a specified period after presentation of a completion report or invoice. ... Have you ever had one of those projects which seemed simple, but once you got into it, you discover non intuitive requirements embedded in your initial enthusiasm? Such a discovery is like pulling a string out of a sweater. Actualizing the Xpertweb meme is a little like that. ... Here's what happens when you think seriously about a useful reputation system: ... Fair enough, those forms could be designed in an afternoon. But there are other considerations. Once completed, where should their data be stored? Today, such information is kept by the seller. Naturally, the seller will yield to the temptation to excise the unflattering remarks. The data could be kept on a central server, but then what happens to reputations built through blood, sweat and tears if the central servers go out of business? It's not like the W3C is gonna store this info for us. Just as bad, any centralized system may not scale as needed or worse, is corruptible, as described in the HumanTech Parable.
The only answer left standing is that both the buyer and the seller must keep the information, which must be identical to be valid. That means that both parties must have a web site with space and programming for the reputation system. Ratings so mirrored are demonstrably valid. If there's any divergence, the ratings cannot be presumed to be valid. The ratings are only useful if subsequent users can access the reputation data.
Conventional wisdom says the data should be a mySQL data base with a CGI. Then, of course, each user would need an XML-RPC or SOAP routine to access reputation data from all the other sites. That's a load which is sure to overload the requirement for user-maintained data. (Visionary doesn't have to mean stupid?there are some experts who think Xpertweb is silly enough already!)
The obvious but counter-intuitive answer is to post all data as pure XML in plain sight on each user's Xpertweb site with known paths to the data. As Doc reported on Thursday, these requirements seem implicit if you're serious about a useful reputation system, sort of like seeing the horse in a block of marble and removing all the marble that doesn't look like a horse.
In fact, as Doc also related, a useful reputation system seems to me to be implicit in the XML spec. Though enterprises seem to be using XML primarily as a serialization routine (like SOAP) to connect legacy data systems, XML is fine as a data format, if you're willing to live with its verbosity. As a data format hosted on a web server, XML is readable by search engines, a skillion parsers and certainly by a thin-client purpose-built script like the one we're building for Xpertweb. We're even on the cusp of a promise dormant since the spec became a recommendation in February, 1998:
An XHTML page can contain explicit links to bits of XML data and, without any programming display linked data when the page is opened. XML is truly data for the rest of us, because it frees us from CGI programming and the hidden data that only CGIs can talk to. ...
I see a reputation engine as a kind of internal combustion engine. Even if it's a two-banger, you still need quite a few moving parts to get it to turn over. I think we have a pretty good design and built-in means to re-engineer it while it's running. That's why I welcome dogma slayers, but note that there's more to a reputation engine than it seems at first. [
Roland Tanglao: KLogs]
comment [] - See Also: blogs knowledge_solutions
