The Progress Bar

If you follow the reputation space in any way, this is going to be an excellent event.

The Information Society Project at Yale Law School is proud to present Reputation Economies in Cyberspace. The symposium will be held on December 8, 2007 at Yale Law School in New Haven, CT.

This event will bring together representatives from industry, government, and academia to explore themes in online reputation, community-mediated information production, and their implications for democracy and innovation. The symposium is made possible by the generous support of the Microsoft Corporation.

I hope they record the event as I won’t be able to attend.

Rapleaf continues to add features and gain traction after seemingly beating out several other reputation tracking systems. What services do you use to track your reputation?

Thousands of sites are building address book importers so their users can find or invite their friends – the problem is that you have to buy the code to do it (and only the very expensive products are reliable) and you have to maintain that code.

Now Rapleaf just released the Rapleaf Address Book API, which you can use to build your own address book importer with no effort. Accelerate your viral growth with this easy to use API.The Address Book API allows you to:

• Ask your users for their email login credentials (for Gmail, Yahoo!, AOL, Hotmail/MSN)
• Securely pass the credentials to the Address Book API
• Obtain the names and email addresses of all the contacts in that person’s address book

Check it out at: http://www.rapleaf.com/apidoc/v2/abook

Today I read an article on Edge.org, the topic being why Movie Director Virtual Reality Pioneer Jaron Lanier feels that Wikipedia is dangerous. (Read the story to see why I struck Movie Director.)

Before I say anything I have to give a shout out to Jaron, who I met briefly at the Omega Institue in 1993 I believe. As well as being a talented musician, Jaron coined the term ‘Virtual Reality’ and in the early 1980s founded VPL Research, the first company to offer virtual reality gear like data gloves and head-mounted displays. Back in the days when a few hundred polygons was considered a rich virtual environment.

When I met Jaron I, along with a few friends, founded the Boston Computer Society Virtual Reality Group. It was one of the first VR user groups and at one point we had monthly meetings with hundreds of people showing up to catch a glimpse of cyberspace. I digress back to amazing times. 486 Mhz, 4 MB RAM, talk about delirious with power.

I’m not going to regurgitate Jaron’s article, go read it for yourself.

Today I started my first Wikipedia page, for the term Prepositional Marketing. At first I tried to create a page for Theprogressbar, but that was immediately because Wikipedia thought it was a vanity entry, which is reality is was. My intention was to create a base page from which I could hang links to various Wikipedia pages. What I was really trying to do was create a mix of Wikipedia and a blog when really what Wikipedia is good for is linking to, from blogs. Think “if you don’t believe me, or want additional detail, go to the Wikipedia entry.”
I link to Wikipedia all the time. I don’t worry to much about what’s actually written on the pages I link to, most are usually topics that do not illicit the fervor of the constantly overwritten Wikipedia faithful.

I assume, and this is always where I get in trouble, that people triangulate everything that’s important to them that they read on the interweb. I wouldn’t buy a baby seat from a linkfarm blog just as I wouldn’t pay much attention to a liberal blog written by backers of Focus on the Family.

A tremendous amount of discussion is happening about the usefulness/truthfulness of Wikipedia, as evidenced by the responses to Jaron’s article found on BoingBoing over the weekend.

In short, the two sides argue over the value of Wikipedia entries, which can be edited an infinite number of times by anyone.

One would think the entry for the color red would remain generally static over time, the majority of edits would be minor refinements to language and the addition of supporting data. Now, take a topic like the Davinci code or The morning after pill. Edits galore often several times a day. Much more of a lightening rod than the color red. Wait, I take that back, who knew the color red gets edited so often?

Clay Skirky proposes a ‘dashboard’ for each entry (via Black Belt Jones), allowing the browser to make his or her own mind up to the veracity of the information by making transparent the contributions and changes to that entry over time.

dana boyd says:

Wikipedia appears to be a legitimate authority on a vast array of topics for which only one individual has contributed material. This is not the utopian collection of mass intelligence that Clay values.� This misconstrues a dynamic system as a static one. The appropriate phrase is “…for which only one individual has contributed material so far.

Dana and Clay blog for Many2Many at Corante, where I have my other blog.

I leave the academics of the Wikipedia discussion to the academics. The point I want to make is that Wikipedia is a perfect example of a collaborative site in dire need of some sort of augmented ClaimID microformat.

Clearly. enough people feel Wikipedia needs additional functionality to augment the updating process. Authenticity, authority, identity and reputation all come into play when discussing the meritocracy we call Wikipedia.

Tufte’s Sparklines and the IBM Wikipedia History Flows are fun to look at, but appear to lack enough transparency through to the underlying data to make it more than eye candy. This got me thinking about the role ClaimID and Rapleaf could play in entry maintenance.

Claiming Wikipedia content with ClaimID, your authority measured by Rapleaf, your overall Wikipedia mojo captured by Opinity or iKarma. All ideas worth investigating. For now, I toss up the trial balloon to see what the blog world brings back on the topic.

One things is for certain. Wikipedia is slowly introducing more institutional mechanisms. Let’s hope that some sort of content claiming/reputation system are among them.

According to Silicon Beat, e-commerce reputation service Rapleaf has raised $1 million dollars. Congrats to Auren and the team. The company has struck a chord, especially when you consider that eBay banned Rapleaf within weeks of launching. As I have said previously, Rapleaf is a data provider/node which could also be categorized as an aggregator/hub. Great timing for the identity aggregators who need data like Rapleaf’s but don’t have the resources to go out and reinvent the wheel.

Looking forward to seeing what we can do with the API and how they will be securing the service from fraud. Next month the marketing push will commence.

Recently I responded to an iKarma press release which outlines some of the new features found at the Identity Aggregator.

Paul Williams, CEO of iKarma, responded with a lengthy comment, going into considerable detail about each new feature and how each of the aggregators, mainly Opinity, iKarma and to some extent Trufina, are shifting market focus.

First, a disclaimer: I’ve been an advisor Trufina in the past and hope to work with the companies I mention in this post. My primary interest lies in aggregated clickstream/identity/attention providers are positioning their product offerings to provide useful services which bring marketers closer to consumers in new and innovative ways.

I need to mention ROOT markets because that is a major piece of the puzzle that’s not often mentioned in the same breath with identity aggregators. The Attention Trust deserves a shout out as well, although a lot needs to happen before they get the traction needed to earn their place in the Identity Stack.

Aggregating identity data is only the first step. These companies have been refining their business models for quite some time. This is the nature of the game during this round of positioning. The VC know it, the companies themselves know it and the the partners they are trying to attract can sense the tectonic movement underneath the entire sector as they figure out how everyone fits together.

This is not necessarily a bad thing. Solving difficult problems takes time, ongoing business model refinement, evolving partnerships and realizing that ceeding market sectors to competition can often be the best move in order to advance.

To get back to Paul’s comments. He says that Monster, LinkedIn, Opinity and Rapleaf have been “moving as much in our direction as we have been moving in theirs” and goes on to make the case.

I have been tracking theses companies closely for the past year and agree with Paul, but only partially. From my perspective, the core differences between nodes and hubs, i.e data providers and aggregators, continues to lessen.
I’m constantly looking for ways to refine the differentiation between all of these services and the myriad of competition that’s on the way. There is clearly an identity problem in the identity management space. For example, IKarma is supposed to be a useful and friendly sales tool for business. That clearly puts it in the business reputation box, which is complimentary to identity management and actually more similar to Rapleaf than Opinity.
Trufina, once considered a provider of background checks, continues to roll out features similar to Opinity and iKarma. Existing relationships between the companies may come under considerable strain as they risk redundancy of services.
I disagree with Paul about Opinity looking more like Myspace. Paul, perhaps you could clarify this point. If anything, everyone is starting to resemble AIM pages/Tribe.net/insert name of your favorite personalized modularize home page portal here.
On a scatter chart, the grouping appears tightly packed. If anything, the entire grouping is shifting en masse around the board. The shift directly correlates to two things at the moment, potential revenue and funding sources.

Of course Opinity partnered with Rapleaf, that makes total sense. If a node, or data provider like Rapleaf goes away, a hub, or aggregator like Opinity will simply replace them with another node that offers similar functionality and data. That’s the flip side of Web 2.0 (how I hate that phrase), or owning your own data. Rapleaf is actually playing both sides, it’s a node with aggregator spots. This is a good position for them.

I think it’s important for each of the companies mentioned to put themselves in the shoes of the Biz Dev teams at a job boards or business networking sites or major marketing or advertising firms. How do I gauge which solution makes the most sense for my company’s particular circumstances? In my life as a management consultant and advisor, running these types of scenarios is common practice and super-helpful.

Most people don’t want a service that does everything, they want something that fixes a problem they have. Adding reputation reviews is firmly in the “would be nice” column for most companies. To a select few, it’s their most-needed feature. Figuring out the difference between the “would be nice” companies and the “must have’s” is clearly an important exercise for all involved.

My Myspace and LinkedIn pages are much more relevant to a potential employer than my Flickr photostream. A potential first date wants to see my photos, personal profile and perhaps reputation, not my LinkedIn profile. That’s why contextual profiles are so important.
It is going to be very interesting to see how PeopleAggregator fares. Broadband Mechanics has been working with AIM Pages and they too claim to want to do everything for everyone any way they can with any API. This broad focus makes for good buzz, success lies in them being able to deliver real value to the consumer or advertiser where money changes hands. I’m all for people owning their own data, but most people just don’t know or care enough to make the effort to use these services in their current forms.

I’m taking notes while listening to Aldo’s podcast with Fred Stutzman at ClaimID. Aldo knows everyone in the identity space and I was happy to turn him on to ClaimID, which I had learned about just days before Aldo and I did our podcast.

Fred thinks people may pay $5 a year to use ClaimID, or perhaps it will be advertising based.

Let’s be clear, ClaimID is more like a microformat than a service. People will most likely not pay for microformats.

They may pay for a service which aggregates your claimed content let’s you in-line the data into your resume. Somewhat likely.

Monster and other job hunting sites may offer the ability to view ClaimID information to employers or ZoomInfo may want to pull ClaimID data into your profile page. More likely.

LinkedIn and other business networking sites are likely partnership candidates of some sort.

The usefulness of ClaimID is limited until authenticity issues are addressed, until then, people will claim anything and we’ll have claim-spam. We’ll see how ClaimID is received at the Identity Mashup.

Many of the major players in the Identity business all on the same one hour IT Conversations radio show.

Steve Gillmor, contributing editor, ZDNet

Doc Searls, senior editor, Linux Journal

Craig Burton, founding member, Novell; co-founder, The Burton Group

Kim Cameron, Microsoft’s Architect of Identity and Access Systems

Dave Winer, father of RSS and more

Marc Canter, Broadband Mechanics

Bryan Field-Elliot, CTO, Ping Identity Corporation

Phil Windley, Brigham Young University

Drummond Reed, CTO, Cordance

The Gang digs deeper into digital identity with a panel of experts. It begins as a Kumbaya of identity vendors and technologies, but by the second half the gloves come off. Craig points out that everyone has built silos so far because there have been no alternatives. Is the idea of a Microsoft silo “old fashioned thinking,� as Kim suggests, defending the company he joined not all that long ago? He then presents the first five of his seven Laws of Identity—clearly well thought out and vendor independent as all agree…