Alex Kirtland and I have an article published in the online web design magazine Boxes and Arrows about how to design online reputation and rating systems. Check it out here.

Check out Honesty Online — they sell digital certificates that help you to prove that you are who you say you are, online. How it works is you enter some personal details and a credit card number. They do a background check on you, and fish up some information that only you should know. Then you get randomly quizzed on this information. If you pass, you get to buy a certificate that verifies your identity. I think it only works for people who live in the US.

Their main targets seem to be users of social networking sites and online dating. I can see that it could be quite useful for online dating. I’m not so sure about social networks, I think your network of friends is already a pretty good signal of your credibility. It could also be useful on reputation-based sites, like eBay, for initial users who don’t yet have a reputation to trade on.

One issue is that many people may wonder about whether the certificates can be faked. Similar to certificates used for secure e-commerce servers, an elaborate encryption scheme is used to make certificate faking virtually impossible. However, I wonder whether many people can fully appreciate this feature and understand how the encryption works so that they can trust it. Worries about e-commerce security is a major factor that prevents people from shopping online.

(HT: Web 2.Oh … Really?)

On 101ratings.com (my other blog): Rating systems versus reputation systems.

This video is doing the rounds at the moment, making fun of the privacy aspects of Facebook:

Personally, I’m not a privacy nut and I don’t think Facebook is evil. But let me toss out this idea: Facebook is the biggest reputation system the world has ever seen. Forget about eBay, its reputation system only tracks your behaviour in online auctions. Facebook tracks your behaviour in the real world and reveals it for all (or at least all who you care about) to see. Of course, Facebook itself isn’t tracking you, but your friends are, and they’re publishing that information. Put unkindly, Facebook is a platform that enables a user-generated big brother.*

One interesting thing is how this will affect people’s behaviour. As the video points out, Facebook links your stupid behaviour at that party to future things, like potential girlfriends. This raises the cost of stupidity and thus people will behave less stupidly (I am assuming that the decision to behave stupidly or not is a rational one of comparing costs and benefits …). Anyway, social networking websites encourage conformity and punish bad behaviour — the crowdsourced morality police.

Another interesting thing is that you can use Facebook to commit yourself to good behaviour. Suppose you want to behave well but can’t trust yourself not to have one too many drinks and do something stupid at a party. The solution is simple, surround yourself with lots of Facebook friends and arm them with digital cameras …

* I know, I’m being unfair, Facebook has pretty sophisticated privacy settings that let you finely control your information. I’m over-dramatising to make a point.

In my spare time recently I’ve been working on a little project with Alex Kirtland to develop a directory site for these various rating and reputation websites that are popping up all over the place these days. As well as a directory, we have a blog and are working on a “gallery” of reputation and rating systems that should be a useful resource for designers of these systems.

Our directory is split into two types of rating sites — those for products and services, and those for fun. In the latter category, check out Rate My Rosetta and Rate My Turban. Of course, you can also rate the rating sites in our directory.

The site is up and running at 101ratings.com. We’re still adding sites to the directory, and if you run one or know one that isn’t listed, there’s a submission form. Please check it out, tell me what you think, and tell your friends.

Thanks also to loyal blog reader Chewxy for helping me out with some tricky web bits.