My BarCampLA Presentation

Here’s the link to my presentation from BarCampLA: http://straussnet.gorjk.com/random/Reputation.ppt

The first few slides are a bad joke based on the presentation Ian was to make later in the day (Media 2.0 Physics). So, you can probably skip straight to slide 8. Also, a special shout-out to Michael for sharing his presentation time with me.

I did some work on another presentation over the last week. But last night when Ian and I were comparing notes, I found mine to be very similar to his. So, I decided to explore a topic that has been nagging at me for a long time – it stems from my feeling that reputation infrastructure is being overlooked in the race to on-demand media experiences.

A lot of this thinking crystallized through discussions at and following an emerging technologies seminar put on by The Media Center at the American Press Institute way back in February 2005. Chris Anderson of Wired and, probably more importantly, Long Tail fame was a presenter, and I had an opportunity to chat with him after he spoke. The quotations I attribute to him in my BarCampLA presentation came from a subsequent continuation of our conversation via email. That event also sparked an extended conversation with Rich Skrenta of Topix.net that resulted in a related blog post by him, which also generated a blog post by Russell.

In the 14 hours between when I came up with the presentation title (Reputation as Currency) and when I presented it today, I tried to take those discussions along with the developments of the last year and put them into a sequence of slides that make some kinda sense. I’m not sure that the final product stands alone, but I was pretty happy with the discussion that it provoked. The point I was trying to get across is that I think we need a W3C-type open format for reputation. In a nutshell, my hypothesis is that pervasive on-demand digital delivery (i.e. ubiquitous search) will reveal a user need for the highest quality recommendations, which demands highly trusted systems that can only be enabled by a widely adopted standard for interacting with entity reputation. The reason I think it needs to be an open format is that the full power of such a system can only be realized through distributed innovation – and it needs to be able to work across walled gardens, because our social networks aren’t limited by our friends’ email domains.

So if any of that makes sense to you, please comment and continue the conversation. I know what I want the final product to look like, but there is a long and winding road between here and there – and I ain’t got the map. One of the things Ian mentioned I should look into is the Identity2.0 concept being evangelized by Dick Hardt of Sxip. We shall see…

So per Ian’s suggestion, I watched Dick Hardt’s Identity 2.0 presentation at Web 2.0 2005. And I have to say that there is a lot of overlap with my call for an open reputation format. I do agree with him that a universally adopted open format for secure identity is probably a prerequisite for distributed personalization on the web, but I’m not sure if I agree with his rationale for adoption (he doesn’t seem so sure himself, but suggests that website operators will have an interest in standardizing at some point). Coopting his thesis into my hypothesis about the emerging importance of automated personalized discovery (aka recommendations) in media consumption , I think that the uderlying need for a reliable open format for reputation may be a driver for the adoption of the necessary secure identity standards. I’m gonna see if Stewart can put me in touch with Dick next time he’s in town to discuss some more.

On a related note, an unnamed executive at an unnamed online company, who spoke at BarCampLA after me, went to town on the dozen or so Yahoo! employees in the audience (out of ~30 people, LOL!) for Yahoo!’s recent conduct in China. He personally challenged us for our lack of moral outrage at the fact that our company turned over the identity of dissident Chinese journalists, resulting in their imprisonment. I have to say that he is right! I am pretty pissed off at whoever made that decision (I have no idea to what level it was escalated at the time), and I’m also pissed at the fact that we as a company have a culture that would allow that decision to happen and only see a downside in it when it results in bad PR. I guess I’m not going to quit the company over it, but it definitely doesn’t make me feel warm and fuzzy about the big purple.

After doing some more research, I do have to agree with Randy‘s comment that I was way too quick to jump on the bandwagon. I guess the uninformed thrashing I got at BarCamp clouded my judgment. It turns out that the situation that has been oversimplified to Yahoo! turning over dissidents to the Chinese police (and has been likened to collaboration with the Nazis in WWII) is in fact much more complex. I think there is a pretty well-researched and objective account here, also Russell gives his never blunted point of view here.

What I have learned is that the Chinese government does not have to provide Yahoo! with the nature of the crime suspected when making a request from information – it could be for a child molester, drug dealer, or DVD pirate (heaven forbid!) just as easily as a political agitator. And because part of being a registered internet provider in China is complying with such requests, Yahoo! or MSN or Google or anyone else who wants to offer services to the Chinese people would need to forfeit their right to do business there in order to protest such a warrant – all that without knowing the nature of the suspected crime (i.e. is it something really bad or something we think is ok – also since when is it the role of a private company to pass moral judgment on the laws of a sovereign nation?).

So now, I’m not really pissed at Yahoo! anymore. I’m more pissed at myself for not having been engaged enough beforehand to have the knowledge to rebut the under-informed attacks leveled against me and my colleagues this weekend. But, I’m still leaving up the poll (though with a minor copy change) because I want to test out the feature.