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I am expanding the original goal of this wiki to encompass my lifestreaming and lifestyle design research. Currently collecting thoughts and notes on the Resources page (also holds #dieuniversitydie). Check recent Correspondence for suggestions by others.

Here is a budding section on Information Policy, which I am studying in a class with Dr. Doty this semester.

Also working on: What/So What, a list of annotated influences. The course blog is here.

For The Popular Podcast info, check out TPPWiki.

I'm in a technology and work class where I'll be doing some ethography business. Plan so far: to study the occupation of the psychic/intuitive.

Check out some virtual world / Second Life info too...

Looking for intellectual property resources?

Did you know there is no such thing as privacy?

And of course some random productivity info. Along the same lines, I'm looking into moving into the cloud.

inspiration // to read // to listen // funding resources

web development quick links, DIY, iphone apps and resources

GTD and productivity

health | tattoo recs | psychology

Purpose of this wiki (as of summer 09)

I ultimately arrived at this point of study because I was investigating the US university system. I came to grad school with the intention of looking for a teaching job in design, and learned that a big part of being university faculty is getting research published and disseminated. Sounds reasonable, right? But as I dug deeper, I became unsettled. I determined that the traditional “publish or perish” model was painfully inadequate. I concluded copyright was obsolete, but that the peer reviewed printed journal publishing system depended on copyright to maintain their business models. I found that ensuring a transition to open access to publicly funded academic data, research and published papers was absolutely integral to our collective intellectual progress. And the most frequent issue I ran into with actual friends and faculty was that work published in online scholarly journals or other internet-based projects was rarely, if ever, useful to gaining a tenured position at a university.

At the beginning of the summer I considered looking deeper into institutional repositories, or game theory as an alternative to peer review. Then I started getting way too ambitious and considered planning some alternative university in Second Life proposal. But after a meeting with Dr. Strover, we determined that what might be most useful to my work is a thorough investigation into online credentialing in general. So what if information is free and available to the public online? There is no system of credentialing it. There are peer reviewed journals online, but what about the rest of the information that isn’t peer reviewed? How do we know when to trust what we read or not? Is there some sort of class system? And how does a university tenure committee know when to trust the work you’ve done online?

The simple answer: the internet is self-policing, and all of us who grew up online are the cops. This, however, does not bring us any closer to solving the problem of gaining the trust of those in institutional power.

(Why I want this trust is a whole different matter entirely, likely due to my dire need to please and be praised.)

So I’m going to start somewhere, anywhere, and see if I can tease out what I already know and if it matches up to my reading. How do you determine what information to trust online? The simplest form of trust I can find is rating systems. Ebay’s is trusted, but sponsored Google search results are not.

(Original post on The Popular Podcast)

recent reputation news

http://www.readwriteweb.com/readwritestart/2009/11/second-life-founder-launching.php?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+readwriteweb+(ReadWriteWeb)#

Definitions/differentiation of terms: reputation, social capital, credibility, trust

Reputation: is the opinion (more technically, a social evaluation) of the public toward a person, a group of people, or an organization.

Social capital: is a social science concept used in business, economics, organizational behaviour, political science, public health and sociology that refers to connections within and between social networks.

Credibility: According to BJ Fogg and Hsiang Tseng in their paper "The Elements of Computer Credibility", credibility is synonymous with "believability". "What is “credibility”? Simply put, credibility can be defined as believability. Credible people are believable people; credible information is believable information. In fact, some languages use the same word for these two English terms.

Throughout our research we have found that believability is a good synonym for credibility in virtually all cases. The academic literature on credibility, which dates back to the 1930s (see [32, 381 for a review), presents a more sophisticated view of credibility, although the essential meaning is similar to what we propose."

"First, credibility is a perceived quality; it doesn’t reside in an object, a person, or a piece of information. Therefore, in discussing the credibility of a computer product, one is always discussing the perception of credibility. Next, scholars agree that credibility perceptions result from evaluating multiple dimensions simultaneously. Although the literature varies on how many dimensions contribute to credibility evaluations, the vast majority of researchers identify two key components of credibility: trustworthiness [and] expertise.

What this means is that in evaluating credibility, a person makes an assessment of both trustworthiness and expertise to arrive at an overall credibility assessment. "

Trust: instituteforpr.org's definition "Trust is one party’s willingness—shown by intention and behavior—to be vulnerable to another party based on confidence developed cognitively and affectively that the latter party is (a) benevolent, (b) reliable, (c) competent, (d) honest, and (e) open."

"Trust is critical to the functioning of our society at all levels—interpersonal, small group, organizational, and societal—and is especially central to the practice of public relations. You can’t have credibility without it. And, trust appears to be the most central component to satisfactory relationships. If the purpose of public relations is to establish and maintain relationships with key stakeholders through communication and other efforts, then public relations is essentially in the trust-making business.

To gain this trust, one must trust others, because trust is reciprocal. One must also be trustworthy, which seems to be best measured by whether one is perceived as having competence, integrity, goodwill, reliability, and is open. Caring about the needs of others, telling the truth, and being dependable all increase trustworthiness. Trying to exert influence or pressure on others for the sake of meeting self-serving interests appears to damage trust.

In the end, trust is a bottom-line indicator that can improve more than the financial status of an organization, but it requires years of consistent actions. It can and should be measured and included as a critical indicator on the dashboard for any organization concerned about relationships and reputation."

The paper "The Elements of Computer Credibility" offers a simple synonym to "trust": "dependability".

Deliberation: As in public deliberation (or "deliberative democracy"), legal deliberation is a form of communication which emphasizes the use of logic and reasoning (as opposed to power, coercion or emotion) to make sound decisions.

A list of existing reputation systems, pre-Internet.

Name and birthplace
Religion
Social class / wealth
Education
Science/scientific method
Peer review
Mass media
Public relations
Corporate and personal branding
Lifestyle/consumer choices

Trust and PR Practice: includes a brief history of writings on trust, by Steve Rubel. Steve Rubel is SVP, Director of Insights for Edelman Digital, a division of Edelman - the world's largest independent PR firm. He is charged with helping clients identify emerging technologies and trends that can be applied in marketing communications programs. He also explores these topics on his lifestream site and in his bi-weekly AdAge column.

An exploration of the ways in which the Internet is changing/augmenting/influencing expectations of reputation and credibility

1. Sheer mass of information available already: we can now search for and sift through millions of opinions quickly.

2. Crowdsourcing: the sheer mass of people participating in generating, processing and sharing information allows us to see aggregate opinions.

3. Distrusting information available online (in academia, professions, old media's influence): since words on the Internet can be changed instantly and endlessly revised, some people place more trust in the printed word because it does not change.

4. Measurable "whuffie" or social capital (in commentary, votes, views, friends, followers): computers allow us to collect, combine, and view information in ways that attempt to reduce matters of reputation to simple numbers that can be easily compared to others.

An examination of algorithmic/machine-based credibility mechanisms

(Some preliminary information about users trusting the computers they are using) Also from "The Elements of Computer Credibility": "Computers gain credibility when they provide information that users find accurate or correct; conversely, computers lose credibility when they provide information users find erroneous. Although these conclusions seem obvious, we find this research valuable because it represents the first empirical evidence for these ideas."

"Situational factors that affect credibility: The credibility of a computer product does not always depend on the computer product itself. Context of computer use can affect credibility. The existing research shows that three related situations increase computer credibility:

1. In unfamiliar situations people give more credence to a computer product that orients them.

2. Computer products have more credibility after people have failed to solve a problem on their own.

3. Computer products seem more credible when people have a strong need for information.

Indeed, other situations are likely to affect the perception of computer credibility, such as situations with varying levels of risk, situations with forced choices, and situations with different levels of cognitive load. However, research is lacking on these points."

What are things the computer does for us that we trust inherently? Math, search results, time. How does the computer evaluate information and decide which to return as true? Perhaps Google's search algorithm found on their corporate information page can shed some light:

"The software behind our search technology conducts a series of simultaneous calculations requiring only a fraction of a second. Traditional search engines rely heavily on how often a word appears on a web page. We use more than 200 signals, including our patented PageRank™ algorithm, to examine the entire link structure of the web and determine which pages are most important. We then conduct hypertext-matching analysis to determine which pages are relevant to the specific search being conducted. By combining overall importance and query-specific relevance, we're able to put the most relevant and reliable results first.

- PageRank Technology: PageRank reflects our view of the importance of web pages by considering more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. Pages that we believe are important pages receive a higher PageRank and are more likely to appear at the top of the search results.

PageRank also considers the importance of each page that casts a vote, as votes from some pages are considered to have greater value, thus giving the linked page greater value. We have always taken a pragmatic approach to help improve search quality and create useful products, and our technology uses the collective intelligence of the web to determine a page's importance.

- Hypertext-Matching Analysis: Our search engine also analyzes page content. However, instead of simply scanning for page-based text (which can be manipulated by site publishers through meta-tags), our technology analyzes the full content of a page and factors in fonts, subdivisions and the precise location of each word. We also analyze the content of neighboring web pages to ensure the results returned are the most relevant to a user's query."

List of reputation systems using human-computer interaction

customer reviews (Amazon, ePinions)
rating/feedback systems (Netflix, Ebay)
Digg methods (voting up or down)
forums (views and replies)
Password protected information (subscription access, data sensitivity, internal institution information)

Problems exist with many crowd generated reputation systems because people group together to beat the computer. See more at Herding the Mob

Recommended reliable (or emerging) systems of discerning credibility and evaluating reputation online.

1. Inverted tag clouds: At the ISDT09 conference, Tiago Peixoto discussed using inverted tag clouds to give more equal attention to neglected or unpopular concepts. This method might have interesting bearing on reputation systems, by giving equal attention to ideas with less views. Since the crowd tends to more highly value popular concepts, a more accurate reputation system could result.

2. Collaborative mindmaps: "By presenting ideas in a radial, graphical, non-linear manner, mind maps encourage a brainstorming approach to planning and organizational tasks. Though the branches of a mindmap represent hierarchical tree structures, their radial arrangement disrupts the prioritizing of concepts typically associated with hierarchies presented with more linear visual cues. This orientation towards brainstorming encourages users to enumerate and connect concepts without a tendency to begin within a particular conceptual framework."

Mind maps offer an interesting look at reputation systems because they can be created organically and visually.

3. Moderated virtual world forums: in Second Life (and other virtual worlds), one can be an embodied entity online. Bringing the experience of actually interacting face-to-face with other people (avatars) allows a more immersive communication experience. This differs from real world interaction because in Second Life, one can choose an avatar with any race, gender, or physical appearance he desires. This removes face-to-face power hierarchy and allows more truly democratic communication. Additionally, with the use of text chatting (as opposed to voice), members of a discussion feel more free to contribute their ideas. Discussions that are organized and moderated in virtual worlds may contribute to an interesting reputation system.

4. Lifestreams: the 2004 article "Manifesto for the Reputation Society" by Hassan Masum and Yi–Cheng Zhang concluded this:

"The ultimate aim is to increase the level of collective wisdom through sharing our separate experience and expertise. This will enable a "division of experience" — instead of each of us personally suffering through scams, cheats, and mediocrity, we will be able to leverage each other’s experiences. Collectively, aided by astutely networked reputation systems, we stand the best chance of overcoming our dark side and bringing out the best in us."

This corroborates completely with the emerging popularity of the concept of lifestreaming. Lifestreams enable us to share comprehensive personal experience, and when our data is collected in one place, it becomes a mirror of ourselves that can be used to judge personality quite similarly to judging someone's reputation in real life. The sheer quantity of information produces its own certain quality. Liking the person or not, we can come to expect a certain sort of consistency in his or her lifestream.

Being able to search public lifestreams for experiences and judge the information based on the quality and quantity of the lifestream comes very close to replicating real life word-of-mouth recommendations at a massive scale. And while a digital participation barrier continues to separate real and virtual life, the digital lifestream might be a little more honest than face-to-face meetings.

Ideally, the honesty in one's lifestream will enhance one's real-world life in a closed loop: documenting experience causes one to evaluate the experience and learn from it, therefore impacting future actions. Better content publishing will result in a higher quality of information available online and stronger reputations.