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The Reality of Online Reputation 265

Posted by Hemos from the watch-what-you-say dept.
Nicholas Carroll (of Why Unicode Won't Work On The Internet fame) has written a piece for Mindjack entitled "Spinning The Web: The Realities of Online Reputation Management". Trust me - the actual subject matter is a lot more interesting then the title *grin*. The essay is aimed toward companies online, but is applicable to individuals as well.
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The Reality of Online Reputation More

The Reality of Online Reputation

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  • Erm... (Score:2, Funny)

    by The Bungi ( 221687 )
    interesting then the title *grin*.

    *grin*

  • Reputation, Online Communities, and User Numbers (Score:4, Funny)

    by drendite ( 3 ) on Monday February 17, 2003 @06:13PM (#5321782)
    Some online communities base reputation at least partly upon user numbers.

    For example, the mere presence of words uttered by he who has a low user number shines forth radiantly upon all, bestowing in them great wisdom and happiness.

    (Note: the higher user numbers are that much more removed from the Form of Wisdom and Happiness).

  • I Google everything and everybody. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Bug-Y2K ( 126658 ) on Monday February 17, 2003 @06:14PM (#5321788) Homepage

    Especially when I am hiring. I learn more about people and companies via Google than via resume's and marketing-heavy websites.

    Granted, I take everything I read on the Internet* with a grain of salt, but information, no matter the source, is helpful in decision making.

    *Even /.! For example, the "selfish routing" story from last week. Anyone who knows BGP4 knows that article, and 99% of the comments about it were unalduterated and misinformed BS.

    • Re:I Google everything and everybody. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by aridhol ( 112307 ) <ka_lac@hotmail.com> on Monday February 17, 2003 @06:23PM (#5321847) Homepage Journal
      You need to be careful when Googling your applicants. Remember that there are multiple John Smiths out there. Also, be sure that the article posted in John Smith's name is the real John Smith. If he's managed to annoy a troll on Usenet, there's a possibility that this troll may post inflammatory messages using John's email address, so you'll think that John's being immature when it's actually the troll.
    • I have several identities, here on Slashdot. This is but one. I have fans[1] who are foes of my other identities and vice versa. I have many accounts I use for different purposes on Usenet.

      My "official" email address, the one I give to people who matter, never reaches google. It doesn't exist as far as usenet is concerned. You need more than just a pinch of salt if you're using Google to research individuals.

      [1] Just how stupid is that? fans and foes... Ya gotta laugh.
    • I took your advice, and googled you [google.com].

      Your reputation isn't very good. I see you were involved with some hype and computer crashes a few years ago, and caused millions of dollars in damage at some companies.

      Geeze, I'd never hire you! You'd be lucky to get a job as a janitor at chicken farm!
    • Quite true.

      I Googled an applicant for a support position I have available who looked pretty good on his resume.

      Then I found the many profane postings on Usenet indictaing anger and conflict management issues and multiple posting advertising himself as "an escort for sophisticated ladies."

      And yes, this was they guy, easily identified by a very unique name, location clues, and email addresses.
      • You have to take all that with a grain of salt. I have tons of righ-wing, libertarian, anarchist ravings in Usenet, but in real life my politics are much more moderate. Usenet is to explore ideas, not make real world policy.

        I guess how someone handles being flamed might be an indicator of some sort.

    • I learn more about people and companies via Google

      Please, for the sake of your applicants, be careful when you do that. For curiosity's sake, I did a Google directory search for my real name - and got two matches back. The first was for the Georgia Registry of Sex Offenders, the second a list of soldiers killed in Viet Nam. Anyone who took this list at face value would think I'm a dead pervert. :-(

      So, I checked the sites, to see why my name was on these lists. It's not; the first list has someone on it who shares my first name. The second, someone who shares my last name.
    • Me to, but I tend to be a bit dubious of the results. This comes about from the simple act of googling myself. The result is a lot of pointers to people with the same name, all jumbled together, with no obvious way of telling which are about who. If I didn't know which ones refer to me, I'm sure I couldn't figure it out.

      Since hardly anyone has a unique name, this should apply to nearly everyone.

      OTOH, my wife seems to have a unique name. But, on the third hand, it's also a phrase in English, so her name does get a lot of matches.

  • Reputation (Score:4, Funny)

    by VP ( 32928 ) on Monday February 17, 2003 @06:15PM (#5321797)
    Based on the misinformed article on Unicode the author posted before, I am not going to bother reading his current article...

    • Re:Reputation (Score:5, Insightful)

      by DarkVein ( 5418 ) on Monday February 17, 2003 @07:02PM (#5322040) Journal
      No shit. His last article was libelous, and several slashdot readers turned up the truth that his employer was working on a proprietary competitor to the Unicode standard.

      How about this little snippet?
      [...]being a 16-bit character definition allowing a theoretical total of over 65,000 characters. However, the complete character sets of the world add up to approximately 170,000 characters.

      This person does not even do the most cursory research on his subjects. For the uninformed, Unicode [unicode.org] assigns a unique address to every human character (i.e., letter, kanji, heiroglyph). The entire code range is 32-bit (4,294,967,296), with various text formats for addressing those codes (UTF-8 and UTF-16 being the most popular).

      This person is, at best, an attention seeker. He's more likely a very public troll.
      • The unicode article was horrid, and riddled with technical inaccuracies, but this piece on reputation, which is 'soft', is somewhat interesting. I recommend giving him a second chance.
      • Actually, Goundry [hastingsresearch.com] is technically correct that an early revision of UNICODE allowed less than 2**16 codepoints, since it covered only the Basic Multilingual Plane of ISO/IEC-10646.

        However, even at the time this article first came out there was clearly room for future expansion to a 32-bit space. And in any case, BMP is sufficient for all but the most esoteric uses. Sure, linguists studying dead or obscure languages might need special support, but really that's always going to be true. The UNICODE-troll author says he spends all his time spending arcane ancient Chinese texts. That a general-purpose standard is not exactly tailored to his needs is hardly surprising.

        So I agree that the UNICODE article seemed pretty poor, and the author's reputation is low as far as I'm concerned. Picking a temporary limitation and blowing it up into an anglocentrist conspiracy is pretty lame.

        To be fair though, Nicholas Carroll was only an editor of the UNICODE troll, not the author. I wish he'd edited it with rm, though. Some of his other papers are OK, though unoriginal.

  • The new Jon Katz? (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 17, 2003 @06:16PM (#5321804)
    In the beginning, there was email, available to a restricted group of mostly academics via ARPAnet ... With the discovery that emails could be threaded, discussion groups arose ... Even more, reputation began with what you posted, including flames... with the web came serious e-commerce ... ... here, suddenly, came the Web - where credible writing was king, and where travel agent hype met the awesome power of the "Back" button ... L.L. Bean came to the Web with an impeccable reputation of 90 years of quality goods, excellent service, and unconditional guarantees ... outside of e-commerce, the Web is presently a fairly weak means of enhancing one's reputation or agenda, because it provides no means for massive, coherent, "on message" propaganda ... I have yet to see a publicity hound gain prominence through the Internet alone ... a blogger is not exactly tuned to the concept of publishing nonsense simply because it comes from a government source ... one might hope that such a convergence leads on to the amplification of intelligence, rather than mere herd behavior, and lifts humanity to a new level of reasoning.

    Wow, almost as content-free and buzzword-driven as Jon! Care to tell us something we don't know?

    • More content free than Katz. I guess Taco and crew didn't become A-geeks via the internet. Nor did Matt Drudge. I'll accept that the /. guys aren't pure publicity hounds, but Drudge? Glen Reynolds? Andrew Sullivan? Josh Marshall? Any writer for Slate or Salon? This guy did less research than Katz ever has.
  • Add the occasional AllYourBase, and viola! Instant Karma!

  • Time for a new .sig (Score:3, Funny)

    by Mononoke ( 88668 ) on Monday February 17, 2003 @06:17PM (#5321810) Homepage Journal
    I guess my next .sig will be:

    Karma: Excellent (Mostly the result of successful online reputation management)

  • interesting description of /. in the article (Score:5, Funny)

    by sczimme ( 603413 ) on Monday February 17, 2003 @06:19PM (#5321821)

    From the linked story:

    To form an opinion based on reading Epinions or Slashdot takes a lot more work than soaking up a newspaper headline or drooling in front of the six o'clock news. On Epinions you have to read the various reviews and weigh them against each other. On Slashdot one has to read the original article, and think, or at least wade through the posts. (my emphasis)

    Which /. is this, then?

  • Hogwash (Score:2, Funny)

    by grub ( 11606 )

    If anybody was truly concerned about their online reputation, slashdot would have no posts.

    • Re:Hogwash (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Forgotten ( 225254 ) on Monday February 17, 2003 @06:25PM (#5321868)
      It's funny you should say that, because I think this is a big part of the reason online fora like slashdot have such a high lurking rate. Most readers here never post, just as has always been true on mailing lists and Usenet. There's only a small core of vocal posters (the 80-20 rule, except it's more like 98-2 here).

      So if people were less concerned, slashdot would have even more posts than it does. You could raise an interesting debate about whether the steady climb in posts has been due to increased readership, or increased participation (or more accurately, how those components boil down).
      • There's only a small core of vocal posters (the 80-20 rule, except it's more like 98-2 here).

        It's 97-3 now.

      • Most People Have Nothing To Say (Score:5, Insightful)

        by MisterMook ( 634297 ) on Monday February 17, 2003 @08:20PM (#5322430) Homepage
        The thing that has always struck me about people is that even though most of them HAVE opinions they're not always prone to sharing those opinions. It's the way that everyone has an opinion about poilitics and yet still only a fraction of the populace votes.

        Of course a lot of silence is in people online not wanting to chime in expressedly with a "Me Too!" opinion in the presence of a well expressed position that already outlines what they would say themselves if they only could spell, write with some skill, etc. It's the nice thing about the Anonymous Cowards system at Slashdot that people can, if they'd like, post whatever weird or netiquette violating opinion anonymously without slipping in their own opinion like a bad walk with your dog.

        In the end though, I think the success of an online forum's credibility and reputation depends on a couple of factors. Slashdot is very geek/tech/IP heavy in content and slant. Everyone is surprised when someone speaks out in favor of Microsoft on Slashdot even when probably 80% of the readership uses Windows at some point in a day. The **IAA's are ridiculed and revealed at Slashdot, and if we don't always hear about the neatest new gizmo from Slashdot we at least know that in the culture of Slashdot that if someone has retailed a Linux machine Vibrator that SOMEONE at Slashdot has purchased the beast and will eventually post a review on how penguins are in bed. I don't think anyone comes to Slashdot for reviews on cars, because posters at Slashdot aren't perceived as being particularly of the greasemonkey/NASCAR set usually. People will have an opinion on which spark plugs are best at Slashdot but it will be weighted against the idea that the average posters would have less real experience than say the mass of people at a classic car forum.

        One of the advantages of traditional media is that even if we can know that Dan Rather probably doesn't know much about Hot Air Ballooning, we all know that before he speaks out on a story about Hot Air Ballooning that at least someone from the news department has at least implied that they have made an effort to research the sport. Of course, that implication turns on them when they don't know what they're talking about anyways but everyone should know by now that the grains of salt size difference between CNN and a random internet poster is large.
        • Insofar as this is my first post, I think I have something to say for the mass of lurkers on forums such as /. I rarely post to forums because I rarely have any opinion or piece of knowledge that hasn't already been mentioned that I think is worth several hundred people's time to read. In a typical thread I find 2-4 comments I feel make my criteria of being worth posting (if I were the poster). Not wanting to be taken for a troll, I'll quickly add that I enjoy a substantial portion of the posts I read - just most of them don't meet the high bar I've set for myself for posting to a popular forum. Its not that I don't want to share my opinions, but that if everybody shared their opinion we'd have a lot of noise about stuff most of us don't care about, so I set a high threshold for myself. That, and I'm not in computers so I rarely have much knowledge to add to the discussions:)
    • the hope of garnering respect.

  • Hey, /. gets mentioned! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by billbaggins ( 156118 ) on Monday February 17, 2003 @06:21PM (#5321838)
    From the article, down toward the bottom...
    To form an opinion based on reading ... Slashdot takes a lot more work than soaking up a newspaper headline or drooling in front of the six o'clock news.... [O]ne has to read the original article, and think, or at least wade through the posts.
    You have to read the article and think? Who knew?

    Seriously, though, good article, though I think I can sum it up pretty quickly: To maintain a good reputation, tell the truth and offer good service (where applicable). Whodathunkit.

    The other point is the question of when/if the Web will become something that can transform opinions... right now most of the vociferous opinion-raising is of the "preaching to the choir" sort, since if my visitor doesn't agree with me, they'll probably just leave...

    • The other point is the question of when/if the Web will become something that can transform opinions...

      I think it's already happened. The best example I know is the Media Awareness Project [mapinc.org]. This is a web site that posts news stories and other media pieces related to the war on drugs-- pro or con. They have a network of folks who find such stories and post them to the site, and other folks who write letters to the editor whenever they see a story they disagree with. Odd things happen. It's interesting, for example, to see the reaction of small podunk newspapers who suddenly receive a few dozen irate letters in response to what they thought was a perfectly acceptable and innocuous editorial. Say, something everyone in the community can get behind, like "All Drug Users Must Be Shot On Sight!" It's funny, because for a few days the editors go around preening themselves in the mistaken belief that their writing was so powerful that it attracted international attention. They're invariably crestfallen and embarassed when they find out that it was just a web site that brought them their brief notoriety.

      I suppose the moral here is that the web has to connect to some real-world media structures to affect those who don't rely on the web for their news.

  • Slashdot Commits Unicide (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 17, 2003 @06:23PM (#5321850)
    SLASHDOT COMMITS UNICIDE
    Slaughters all non-ASCII-speaking netizens, film at eleven

    THE HAGUE -- Robert ?CmdrTaco? Malda, the owner of the popular technology website Slash Dot, has become one of the first U.S. citizens to be indicted by the International Criminal Court for crimes against typography. The Court, authorized by the Rome Statute and ratified by over 60 nations, is charged with the duty of prosecuting individuals for serious human rights violations such as genocide, torture, and sexual slavery.

    With this prosecution, the Court seems intent on adding a new crime to their docket, the crime of ?Unicide.?

    ?What this ?Taco Commander? did to the international community is unconscionable,? U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan was quoted saying. ?Yesterday, there was a flourishing Unicode-speaking population, numbering in the thousands. Today, there are none. They are all silenced. Their Unicode is either blocked by this so-called ?Lameness Filter? or silently wrenched from their messages.?

    Slash Dot is home to at least 580,000 citizens, who hail from every Internet-equipped country in the world. However, many more ? perhaps nearly a million ? live anonymously amongst the ranks of registered citizens.

    ????? ? ?????, Prime Minister of ???? ?????????????, was outraged when he heard of Slash Dot?s decision to cleanse all Unicode-speaking individuals from their website.

    The White House was dismayed by the decision of the Court to prosecute an American citizen for what the President deemed, a ?politicalized persecutorial.? White House spokesman Ari Flescher announced that the U.S. would, if pressed, go forward with their recently unveiled plan to invade the Netherlands, if this prosecution was not halted. ?This is absolutely stunning,? he said. ?That the United States would be expected to even acknowledge the presence of other character sets other than ASCII is an offense in its own right. You either write in ASCII, or you?re with the terrorists.?

    Slash Dot, and its parent corporation, VA Software, were unavailable for comment.

  • Ack! (Score:3, Funny)

    by cK-Gunslinger ( 443452 ) on Monday February 17, 2003 @06:24PM (#5321864) Journal

    To form an opinion based on reading Epinions or Slashdot takes a lot more work than soaking up a newspaper headline or drooling in front of the six o'clock news. *snip* On Slashdot one has to read the original article, and think, or at least wade through the posts.

    Wait, I should *read* the article first, and *not* form an opinion based upon the article title? WTH? I've being doing it wrong!

  • What about EBay or BizRate's rating systems? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by homb ( 82455 ) on Monday February 17, 2003 @06:26PM (#5321873)
    He doesn't touch or mention at all 2 very effective reputation management (and creation/destruction) systems online at the moment:
    EBay's seller ratings and BizRate's merchant ratings.

    Both use the very powerful feedback system of actual customers being able to effectively swing a vendor's reputation.
    Basically instead of slow word of mouth (how long did it take for LL Bean to get its reputation? years of word-of-mouth), both EBay and BizRate allow incredibly quick dissemination of someone's preceived reputation (and unlike many others, have good safety checks and are heavily self-policing -- just like any reputation management should be).

    • Many of these reputation managers involve rating methods, from Epinions.com's Web of Trust, to eBay's ratings (and huge anti-fraud department), to Slashdot.org's highly-evolved Meta Moderation system.

      It's a very brief mention, but it's there.
    • Speaking of ebay [ebay.com]

      --sex [slashdot.org]

    • Because statements like:

      Grate buyar would selll anytime!!!!!!!!!! A++++++++++++!!!!

      Are not necessarily good proof of one's online integrity.
    • There is some loophole (which I don't completely understand, but is discussed in ebay forums) where "penny auctions" are used to stuff someone's feedback with positives.

      I've found only their negative feedback counts in terms of how trustworthy they are: how much (no more than 0.3% for computer stuff, no more than 0.1% for anything else), what sort, and how they respond to it (as a good indicator of how they'll be to deal with if something DOES go wrong with your transaction).

  • I'd get a "reputation."

    I guess she was right. Drat.

    KFG

  • Name Borrowing (Score:3, Informative)

    by 4of12 ( 97621 ) on Monday February 17, 2003 @06:26PM (#5321876) Homepage Journal

    Adding to the confusion, of course, there are the similar sounding names like the schizophrenic multiple "Bruce Perens" here on Slashdot, that can easily confuse the ingenue:)

  • Another project for Google Labs.... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by gmuslera ( 3436 ) on Monday February 17, 2003 @06:28PM (#5321888) Homepage Journal
    WebQuotes for individuals. You search about a company or some person name and find what is talked by him or about him.

    An internet-wide Karma system could be useful also.

  • read and think? (Score:4, Funny)

    by graveyhead ( 210996 ) <fletchNO@SPAMfletchtronics.net> on Monday February 17, 2003 @06:39PM (#5321943)
    On Slashdot one has to read the original article, and think...

    Nicholas Carroll must be from bizarro world ;)

  • Example: (Score:5, Funny)

    by Lord Bitman ( 95493 ) on Monday February 17, 2003 @06:39PM (#5321945)
    After posting his thoughts on Unicode, the author no longer has a good online reputation. As a result, no one actually bothered to read this article.
  • In this book Orson Card shows (in early 1985) about building some sort of online reputation, so well that it helped one (special) children to be the world leader (not read the later books, so here ends for me what happened about this).

    I don't think that kind of thigs would work in the actual internet... is too broad, and mostly moderated by the community. Also there is no "central" place where all interesting things happens . Google is near that, but the way you use it is very specific and user driven. And Slashdot, well, is news for nerds.

  • Oil Tankers? Talk Radio? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by namespan ( 225296 ) <namespan.elitemail@org> on Monday February 17, 2003 @07:07PM (#5322061) Journal
    The article made sense, in fact, common sense, but there were a few interesting tidbits that made be do double takes:

    In a similar vein, at present it would probably be impossible to spread a false "oil shortage" story through the Internet, as the American oil companies and mainstream media did in 1972. In fact the Internet would probably demolish such propaganda in days. In 1972, it was not until months later that a merchant marine officer told me how his oil supertanker had been held off the New Jersey coast for six weeks at the height of the "oil shortage."

    Whaaat? Anybody know anything else about this? Crackpot conspiracy theory, or little known fact? Why in the world would this have been done?

    The ethnic slaughters in the wake of Yugoslavia's disintegration were largely blamed on inflammatory talk radio - and the absence of contrary opinion.

    Whaaat? Anybody know anything else about this?

    • Re:Oil Tankers? Talk Radio? (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      a quick hunt on google brought up this:

      http://www.populist.com/01.9.letters.html

      (do a find on 'shortage')

      and this:

      "During the Embargo, Maine's Governor, Democrat Kenneth M. Curtis, accused the Nixon Administration of "creating a managed oil shortage to force support of its energy programs." A 1973 study by Philadelphia Inquirer reporters Donald Bartlett and James B. Steele, revealed, that while American oil companies were telling the U.S. to curtail oil consumption, through a massive advertising campaign, the five largest oil companies (Exxon, Mobil, Texaco, Gulf, and Standard Oil of California) were selling close to two barrels overseas, for every barrel (42 gallons) of oil sold here. They accused the oil companies and the Federal government of creating the crisis. In 1974, Lloyd's of London, the leading maritime insurance company in the world, said that during the three months before the Embargo, 474 tankers left the Middle East, with oil for the world. During the three months at the height of the crisis, 492 tankers left those same ports. During the Embargo, Atlantic Richfield (ARCO, whose President, Thornton Bradshaw was a member of the CFR) drivers were hauling excess fuel to storage facilities in the Mojave desert. All of this evidence points to the conclusion that there was no oil shortage in 1973."

      from here:

      http://www.viewfromthewall.com/59crisis.htm
    • I don't know about that particular incident, but I can attest to the great fuel oil shortage of the winter of 1974-75. Somehow there just wasn't any to be had until the price doubled, at which time there was plenty -- without any being processed or moved around, either. It had simply been held up at the tank farms, until the price went as high as they figured they could drive it.

      We had a big tank farm in town, which kinda made the whole thing obvious.

  • Who determines your reputation. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by nhavar ( 115351 ) on Monday February 17, 2003 @07:19PM (#5322131) Homepage
    Unfortunately a reputation is not as much made by what you post but by how people respond.

    For example I have the reputation of "a microsoft shill" or for the simple people "stupid". I have this reputation in spite of the fact that I use and like *nix products and often advocate using *nix depending on the task. My reputation came about when I started to question some of the assumptions and comments made by others. These assumptions and comments were "popular" and usually followed any discussion that included MS. By questioning the popular I became a "shill".

    It strikes me as funny that in a community of "non-comformists" you can be ostracized for not conforming.

    Recently I have been rebuked by some people for my opinion that Hakon Wium Lie's testing methodology and following conclusions about MS targeting opera 7 were incorrect. It was popular to say that MS is evil and it must all somehow be a conspiracy. Commentary continues to be that I am a MS apologist or mistaken, even though noone can disprove the facts I've presented.

    So recently I asked the question "how does one turn the tide of public opinion". I mean if I'm labeled a MS shill because I believe (not in Microsoft but) in telling the truth. Then how do I keep telling the truth in such a way that I keep clear of the MS shill reputation? Or can I? Should I just keep quiet when anyone who is mistaken or repeats a lie about large unpopular companies.

    • Re:Who determines your reputation. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by error0x100 ( 516413 ) on Monday February 17, 2003 @07:44PM (#5322255)

      Well, it could be argued that if Microsoft themselves had NOT in the past attempted to manipulate public opinion with fake "grass roots support" campaigns that they would have more credibility in the public eye, and fewer people would be inclined to suspect that you are planted here by Microsoft. However, since MS has already shown that it does that sort of thing (they've been caught a few times), how can anybody now realistically trust any pro-Microsoft information on popular forums such as /.? Microsoft has dug their own grave on this one - they've destroyed their own credibility.

      And people (surprise surprise) really really do not like being manipulated and deceived - they remember it, and don't want to be fooled again - so they consider it better to distrust any information that might just be more lies and manipulation. DO YOU BLAME THEM? I don't.

      Then how do I keep telling the truth in such a way that I keep clear of the MS shill reputation?

      In short, you can't. Microsoft, with their past behaviour, has made sure of this for you. Since they do do things like plant pro-MS posts in forums like this, any reasonable person knows not to trust any post that resembles a "planted" post.

      Interestingly, one of the ways that more savvy "geurilla marketers" now try to deal with the problem of erosion of public trust is to try make their plants look like objective reviewers that people can trust. For example, the slashdot crowd is much more likely to trust the opinion of someone who claims to be "a Unix user, BUT ... (something positive about MS products) ..".

      The whole of corporate America seems to be currently digging their own credibility graves in this way. In the short-term, cheap deceitful strategies like fake movie fan sites, fake positive reviews, fake pro-product postings on online forums, fake "news" articles in television and newspaper media etc, all of these will in the short term increase brand "mindshare". In the longer term though, as more and more people start to realise they're being manipulated, public trust will erode to the point where people will no longer believe even genuine positive articles about a product.

      When companies stop this BS, then maybe people might begin to trust your opinions again. Until then, its a one-way slide downhill.

      • So then the suggestion is that I should give up on being trusted? That seems like a poor answer (no insult to you). While I understand what you are saying about MS and their behavior I always try to present information not in a PRO-MS way but in an ANTI-LIE way. I can't be responsible for the fact that MS has made poor business decisions, lied cheated or stolen. The only thing I can do is when I see it happen point a finger. But then I have to do the same with every other company.

        The unfortunate part is that when I hold other companies to the same standard that MS should be held to I get bashed for it.

        I guess it's damned if you do damned if you don't.

        • I guess it's damned if you do damned if you don't.

          I guess so, but on the other hand, you can't please everyone - someone out there will always have a problem with what you say. I suppose the best one can do is to just always try to be as honest as possible, and conversely, someone out there will find the value in what you say. There may many "rabidly" anti-MS people on /., and they are probably the most vocal, but there are probably plenty other (probably more knowledgable people) who are capable of seeing what Microsoft does do right, and will get something out of your post.

          Personally I'm very anti-Microsoft because their products and their APIs are mostly of shockingly bad quality, in my experience. But they do get some things right, sometimes. And although buggy, their products do fill most of the needs that they are supposed to, and this is an important point that some OSS developers miss. In my opinion, software is bad everywhere at the moment, not just Microsoft. Programmers across the board (from commercial to OSS) could do with a bit of constructive criticism. Currently we seem to have a lot of developers who just (a) blindly copy everything of someone elses, even the bad stuff and (b) "re-invent the wheel, badly". Although to be fair, there are some really high quality software products out there, in both OSS and proprietary.

          • See and that right there is how I wanted the other conversations to conclude. My opinion was that the discussions about MS "targeting" should be one of "MS poor design choices" and how to constructively get them to create better pages. I think constructive criticism is really the best way to go for any group. Unfortunately the only way most of the community can think of "constructively" getting companies to change is through constructing lawsuits or verbally abusing said companies.

            I agree wholeheartedly with your points.
    • You just shouldn't worry about what damned fools think about you.

      Many of us aren't as dogmatic as that and/or we're capable of dragging our dogmas out for amusement purposes but know how to stow it away under our seat when it's time for the plane to land.

      The concept of 'online community' needs a lot more examination than it's ever received. The 'gee whiz' days when articles and interviews in Mondo 2000 magazine seemed fresh and new, and that there was a 'revolution' in human relations happening have now passed.

      One of the books that I feel does the best job of debunking the concept of an 'Online Community' is 'The Future Does Not Compute Transcending the Machines in Our Midst' by Stephen L. Talbott. It was published by O'Reilly & Associates back in 1995. Talbot is one of the long term employees at O'Reilly, he's a senior editor (or was in 1995). In the book he talks about the newness and idealism, and drags out quotes from some of the most starry-eyed idealists, in the end debunking much of their hype. It's a must-read that almost nobody who has read.

      Wow, I just did a search to find a good citation of Talbott's book and discovered that the full text is available online here [praxagora.com] for free. Everybody check it out. Hopefully, ummm, the fact that it's available for free online won't reduce it's credibility. It's easy these days to download something and stow it away and forget to ever read it.

      Anyhow, don't sweat it that a gathering of the detris of the old battles of Microsoft vs. Macintosh, Microsoft vs. OS/2, Microsoft vs. Amiga, etc. etc. consider you a shill for not sharing their pathological hatred of the company. Their 'side' in the battle of the titans 'lost' and they'll never get over it. It's a shame that they chose Linux as their gathering place, cuz it's so cool otherwise.

    • What reputation are you talking about? Do you really think that wherever you go, online, people say "there goes nhavar, I heard he's a stupid Microsoft shill"? Trust me, you're not suffering from negative public opinion. The vast majority of the public has no idea who you are, or what you stand for. Want a reputation worth complaining about? Get your ideas published in a national newspaper or magazine. Which is, of course, the point of the article.
      • Grow up. I understand exactly what the article is about but the general premise coincided with a question I had recently "asked slashdot" on. I'm not quite so egotistical to think that everyone in the world knows me. The point was that the discussions that I get into within certain community sites quickly get me labeled as an MS shill. While the article might deal with reputation on a more national level there are is still the matter of what reputation an individual makes within a community and even within a small group of people. That's where my question was.

  • Online Rep same as "Local Rep" w/ BBB .... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by adzoox ( 615327 ) on Monday February 17, 2003 @08:17PM (#5322412) Journal
    An online reputation is basically the same as a Better Busiiness Bureau Report. Both are udderly useless and immensely important at the same time.

    I have 10 negative comments out of 1500 on eBay. To the average buyer this means little. To the "I sit at home all day and like to be mean on Holidays" crowd, it's a flag and they agree with the OTHER 10 people. To the second person, I have a pattern of bad customer service. This is one reason I think ebay should make it as difficult to leave negative comments; as they make getting a credit for fees. (File Complaint after 7 days from auction, Wait 10 days for a response, File Non Paying bidder, wait 10 more days, apply for credit.)

    The Better Business Bureau is no different. The ONLY way to get a complaint removed from your file or get it listed as resolved is DO EXACTLY what the Plaintiff says. I don't mean, just refund, if that's the case, but compensate and send a letter of apology if the Plaintiff requested it. Some people can not be satisfied, and some people get twisted pleasure out of misery.

    It's hard to know a fair system. I think complaintants should have profiles too, This is one GOOD thing about eBay, you can view the "Feedback About Others" - in EVERY CASE the users that have left me negative, A) Did so by accident, B)Have a high percent of negatives on their feedback, or C) A high percent of bad experiences (as evidenced by their "FeedBack About Others")

    It's one reason I like the "Karma" on /. - one is able to moderate more, the more Karma one has. One builds Karma by getting high scores for Insightful or Interesting comments, loses Karma by posting offtopic, negative, or stupid comments.

    It is the fault of the complaintant if a transaction goes beyond the one step of asking/commenting nicely "There's something wrong, how can WE fix it?"

    The customer is always right no matter what AS LONG as they are rational, professional, and thankful.

  • I Was Pissed When I Posted That (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Boss, Pointy Haired ( 537010 ) on Monday February 17, 2003 @08:20PM (#5322428)
    In real life, you can get away with saying stuff when you're blind drunk because nobody takes any notice of you.

    Trouble is, people get in from a heavy night out, check email, check slashdot, then post some complete crap that you later regret.

    Moral, Don't Drink and Post.

  • AHAHAHAHAHA (Score:2, Troll)

    by Apotsy ( 84148 )
    ...(of Why Unicode Won't Work On The Internet fame)...

    In other words, a complete and utter moron.

    Seriously, after that Unicode article of his, anyone who knows anything about i18n can tell you this fellow is an idiot who does not do his research, and doesn't understand the things he does research. Just ignore him.

    • Re:AHAHAHAHAHA (Score:2, Insightful)

      by jack torrence ( 521339 )
      just have to say this, but Nicolas Carroll didn't write the Unicode article -- someone else did. Perhaps you should take some of your own advice about doing research before blowing off at the mouth. According to your own line of reasoning this makes you yourself a moron. Ha Ha HAW!!!
  • Hey- check out the quote: ... to Slashdot.org's highly-evolved Meta Moderation system.

    wait, 'highly-evolved'?

    Sounds like the work of an Online reputation manager!
  • At the top of the article is an image of a laptop open, and the desktop image is a huge head of a woman on the desktop of the laptop.
    Were I a serial killer that decapitated my victims and then froze the heads for later perusal and admirement (is that even a word) - then I'd totally have that picture as my desktop background.

    as a whole, the article raises some good points, but there were also parts that I disagreed with on many points - hell, the broad sweeping mention that the airline industry on the web was doomed from the start and then listing the reason as no face to face contact? fuck that, I disagree.

    but this post isn't about my disagreement, it is about the scary blue head.

    fear the head.
  • >>I am overlooking email spammers here, since they have no reputation other than pond scum, and probably never will. Not that they care - for any given product or service, they make their money on the 0.00001% of the target audience that does not despise them

    I've always thought that spammers posessed the reputation of Cow Shit or perhaps a rabid dripping Goat's Penis. Pond scum seems too mild a term.

  • Reputation, and all that (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Animats ( 122034 ) on Monday February 17, 2003 @11:01PM (#5323134) Homepage
    Much to my amusement, Carroll cites my Downside.com [downside.com] as "one of the more sober contrarian sites". The system there was predicting which dot-coms would fail, and when, with painful accuracy. That site got quite a bit of attention. Now it's used mostly by people who like its data mining system for SEC filings. (Type a company name into the search box and see what happens.)

    During the dot-com collapse, I regularly received hate mail, and threatening phone calls. Sometimes from angry CEOs. But not because I was wrong.

    There is little joy in having been right about the dot-com collapse and the ensuing depression. Things are worse than I'd expected. I foresaw the collapse of the dot-coms in early 2000 (it wasn't hard if you can read a balance sheet), suspected the trouble at Enron, but had no idea so many old-economy companies would go under. I was expecting a flight to quality.

    So I have a good reputation, but as a Cassandra.

    What am I predicting now? We're years away from a stock market turnaround. Stock prices are still way too high by historical standards. We haven't reached the bottom yet. That's just from the numbers; the war situation may make things worse.

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