Building web reputation systems

1. Building Web Reputation Systems That Add Value to an Online
Enterprise
Building Web Reputation Systems can drastically enhance the value and relevance of
the content on your website. In fact, the deployment of these systems has played a
major role in the success of industry heavyweights such as EBay, Amazon, Slashdot,
and Xbox Live. These systems essentially work by highlighting the best user generated
comments/content and rewards users for their contributions.
Reputation systems allow users to vote for their favorite products/services and content.
Users are also allowed to write reviews that are related to the website content or
products, as well assign rankings to these products/content.
Popular Reputation Models Online
Vote to Promote - Has been effectively deployed by sites such as Yahoo! Buzz, Reddit,
and Digg that depend on user submitted news. Viewers vote for articles that are of use
to them. The number of votes received by the item determines its ranking and visibility.
Favorites - This is a relatively straightforward system that checks the number of times a
particular content item has been bookmarked by visitors. Determining relevance and
reputation through this method is particularly useful.
Ratings - Some reputation systems allow visitors to express their opinion regarding the
quality of content available on the website. The use of a ‘Thumbs Up’, Bars, or Stars
allows users to assign a definite value to the item under judgment.
Reviews - are a more complex form of reputation system that usually require the
reviewer to rate certain factors before submitting a textual opinion on a particular item
Factors to Consider When Building Web Reputation Systems
Building Web Reputation Systems that have relevance and authenticity can be quite a
complex process. There are several inherent issues that must be tackled in order to
ensure their success. This is applicable to almost any type of reputation system that has
achieved a certain level of user interaction. The sheer volumes of data generated can be
difficult to deal with and the scalability of a system must be considered before
deployment.
Not all the information generated is likely to have the same quality or value. As a result,
there must be a system in place that can distinguish relevant information from
contributions without any real substance. This is easier said than done, and in practical
terms a qualitative analysis of the information coming in to your site can be difficult to
implement.

2. Another factor that needs to be addressed is a sustainable reward policy that
encourages contributions, and provides an incentive to your better contributors to return
and share their opinions.
One technique that has overcome these problems is to recognize the contributions of
regular users by awarding them reputation points based on the volume and quality of the
content generated by them.
Moderating any form of user input is also an important issue and due attention must be
paid to this issue. There are always people that are likely to abuse this process to
promote selfish interests or introduce links (spam) that have no relevance to your site. It
is necessary to consider all these issues while Building Web Reputation Systems.
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