TRAACKR

Just returned from the exciting OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) conference in Santa-Clara this week.

It brought together heavy-hitters such as Bea and Oracle (who, amusingly, became one on Tuesday), but also the likes of Nomura Securities, Software AG, various Chinese startups and mighty Uncle Sam via several branches of government. And in case you’re wondering whether the show was Web 2.0-friendly, there were also intriguing startups, such as Peter Brown’s Pensive, a semantic Web app based in Brussels.

It may have looked like a supreme GeekFest on the surface, but what was being discussed was definitely on that ever-elusive cutting edge, and will change our lives in the very near future (if global warming doesn’t catch up to us first): how information can flow seamlessly through the financial system (and maybe help us avert a few foreclosures in the process); how China and Korea are moving forward with putting entire communities online using open standards systems; and even more interestingly to this writer, how Oasis just created a new technical committee to come up with a standard for an online reputation management system.

Let’s look at some of the names on the committee roster, shall we? They include: BEA, IBM, Sun Microsystems, AOL, Booz Allen Hamilton, CA, Cordance, Google, NeuStar, NRI, VeriSign – all stalwarts of the new economy, and all interested in identifying users in a traceable, verifiable way.

What exactly is a reputation management system anyway? It’s a feedback loop. Identities are emerging across a variety of sites: people posting to MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and so on. This content defines their identity, and creates an intangible reputation. An open reputation system would allow user “PostCrazy” to circulate from site to site with a verifiable history of their online contributions.

Does this sound like Big Brother? Well, all depending whether you look at reputation as a judicial record, or a sort of dynamic resume. The former use would need to be limited to very specific uses and dovetail with security issues such as single sign-on, protection against identity theft, and B2B applications.

The latter is what Traackr is all about: a way to empower users to leverage their valuable UGC, and establish trust and islands of worth in a market flooded with suspicious or mediocre content.

If an ORMS system does emerge, you’ll know whether a review came straight from the manufacturer, a company toadie, or a genuine user. Conversely the user will be able to prove their worth across the entire breadth of their online production.

We vote yes.

Tags: influence, mavens, online reputation, openID, ORMS

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 1st, 2008 at 1:42 pm and is filed under News, Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.