Building Web Reputation Systems- P12

Building Web Reputation Systems- P12: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- P12Figure 6-3. The value of ratings increases with the time value of the content being rated.Items with a great deal of persistence (such as real-world establishments like restaurantsor businesses) make excellent candidates for reputation. Furthermore, it can be ap-propriate to ask users for more involved types of inputs for persistent items, becauseit’s likely that other users will have a chance to benefit from the work that the com-munity puts into contributing content.Determining InputsNow that you have a firm grasp of the objects in your system and you’ve elected ahandful as reputable entities, the next step is to decide what’s good and what’s bad.How will you decide? What inputs will you feed into the system to be tabulated androlled up to establish relative reputations among like objects?User Actions Make Good InputsNow, instead of merely listing the objects that a user might interact with in your ap-plication, we’ll enumerate all the actions that she might take in relation to those objects.Again, many actions will be obvious and visible right there in your application interface,as in Figure 6-4, so let’s build on the audit that you performed earlier for objects.Explicit claimsExplicit claims represent your community’s voice and opinion. They operate throughinterface elements you provide that solicit users’ opinions about an entity, good or bad.A fundamental difference exists between explicit claims and implicit ones (discussedbelow), which boils down to user intent and comprehension.With explicit claims, users should be fully aware that the action they’re performing isintended as an expression of an opinion. That intent differs greatly from the ones forimplicit claims, in which users mostly just go about their business, generating valuablereputation information as a side effect. Determining Inputs | 131Figure 6-4. Look at all of the actions users can perform on a YouTube video page. They include a richmix of inputs with value as explicit claims and implicit claims (and some with no real reputation value). Provide a Primary Value If you present explicit inputs to your users as only that—a mechanism for generating reputation information to feed the system and make your site smarter—you may be inhibiting the community from providing inputs. You are likely to see more input sur- rendered if the contributors get some primary value from their contributions. The primary value can be big or small, but it probably will have some of the following characteristics: • It provides a benefit to the user for interacting with the system: a self-evident and recognizable benefit that users themselves obtain from interacting with a widget. Comments on Digg, for instance, are hidden for a particular user when she “Diggs [thumbs] them down.” This is immediately useful to the user; it cleans up her display and makes the current thread easier to read. Likewise, the 5-star rating system in iTunes is surpassingly useful not because of any secondary or tertiary reputation benefits it may yield, but primarily because it offers a well-articulated and extremely flexible way to manage data. iTunes users can take advantage of stars to sort track listings, build smart playlists, and get recommendations from the iTunes Store. Star rating widgets in iTunes are full of primary value.132 | Chapter 6: Objects, Inputs, Scope, and Mechanism • It provides immediate and evident feedback. Unlike reputation effects that may not be immediately evident because they happen downstream, the system should provide some quick acknowledgment that the user has expressed a claim. This just happens to reinforce good user interface principles as well. (See “Latency Reduc- tion” in Bruce Tognazzini’s First Principles of Interaction Design: http://www.asktog .com/basics/firstPrinciples.html.)Implicit claimsAny time a user takes some action in relation to a reputation entity, it is very likely thatyou can derive valuable reputation information from that action. Recall the discussionof implicit and explicit reputation claims in “The Reputation Statement” on page 6.With implicit reputation claims, we watch not what the user says about the quality ofan entity but how they interact with that object. For example, assume that a reputableentity in your system is a text article. You’ll find valuable reputation information in theanswers to the following questions: • Does the user read the article? To completion? • Does the user save the article for later use? — By bookmarking it? — By clipping it? • Does the user republish the article to a wider audience? — By sending it to a fr ...