Building Web Reputation Systems- P10

Building Web Reputation Systems- P10:Today’s Web is the product of over a billion hands and minds. Around the clock andaround the globe, people are pumping out contributions small and large: full-lengthfeatures on Vimeo, video shorts on YouTube, comments on Blogger, discussions onYahoo! Groups, and tagged-and-titled Del.icio.us bookmarks. User-generated contentand robust crowd participation have become the hallmarks of Web 2.0.
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Building Web Reputation Systems- P10Figure 5-2. “Boca Joe” has played a variety of fantasy sports on Yahoo! since 2002. Do you supposethe reputation he’s earned on the site helps brings him back each year?bond with Fantasy Sports players—one that persists from season to season and sportto sport.Any time a Yahoo! Fantasy Sports user is considering a switch to a competing service(fantasy sports in general is big business, and there are any number of very capablecompetitors), the existence of the service’s trophies provides tangible evidence of theswitching cost for doing so: a reputation reset.Coaxing out shy advertisersMaybe you are concerned about your site’s ability to attract advertisers. User-generatedcontent is a hot Internet trend that’s almost become synonymous with Web 2.0, but ithas also been slow to attract advertisers—particularly big, traditional (but deep-pocketed) companies worried about displaying their own brand in the Wild West en-vironment that’s sometimes evident on sites like YouTube or Flickr.Once again, reputation systems offer a way out of this conundrum. By tracking thehigh-quality contributors and contributions on your site, you can guarantee to adver-tisers that their brand will be associated only with content that meets or exceeds certainstandards of quality.In fact, you can even craft your system to reward particular aspects of contribution.Perhaps, for instance, you’d like to keep a “clean contributor” reputation that takesinto account a user’s typical profanity level and also weighs abuse reports against himinto the mix. Without some form of filtering based on quality and legality, there’ssimply no way that a prominent and respected advertiser like Johnson’s would associateits brand with YouTube’s user-contributed, typically anything-goes videos (see Fig-ure 5-3). Asking the Right Questions | 101Figure 5-3. The Johnson’s Baby Channel on YouTube places a lot of trust in the quality of usersubmissions.Of course, another way to allay advertisers’ fears is by generally improving the quality(both real and perceived) of content generated by the members of your community.Improving content qualityReputation systems really shine at helping you make value judgments about the relativequality of content that users submit to your site. Chapter 8 focuses on the myriadtechniques for filtering out bad content and encouraging high-quality contributions.For now, it’s only necessary to think of “content” in broad strokes. First, let’s examinecontent control patterns—patterns of content generation and management on a site.The patterns will help you make smarter decisions about your reputation system.Content Control PatternsThe question of whether you need a reputation system at all and, if so, the particularmodels that will serve you best, are largely a function of how content is generated andmanaged on your site. Consider the workflow and life cycle of content that you haveplanned for your community, and the various actors who will influence that workflow.102 | Chapter 5: Planning Your System’s DesignFirst, who will handle your community’s content? Will users be doing most of thecontent creation and management? Or staff? (“Staff” can be employees, trusted third-party content providers, or even deputized members of the community, depending onthe level of trust and responsibility that you give them.)In most communities, content control is a function of some combination of users andstaff, so we’ll examine the types of activities that each might be doing. Consider all thepotential activities that make up the content life cycle at a very granular level: • Who will draft the content? • Will anyone edit it or otherwise determine its readiness for publishing? • Who is responsible for actually publishing it to your site? • Can anyone edit content that’s live? • Can live content be evaluated in some way? Who will do that? • What effect does evaluation have on content? — Can an evaluator promote or demote the prominence of content? — Can an evaluator remove content from the site altogether?You’ll ultimately have to answer all of these fine-grained questions, but we can abstractthem somewhat at this stage. Right now, the questions you really need to pay attentionto are these three: • Who will create the content on your site? Users or staff? • Who will evaluate the content? • Who has responsibility for removing content that is inappropriate?There are eight different content control patterns for these questions—one for eachunique combination of answers. For convenience, we’ve given each pattern a name,but the names are just placeholders for discussion, not suggestions for recategorizingyour product marketing. Asking the Right Questions | 103 ...