How Google & Co. Will Rule Your Rep

WSJ ^ | 01-13-2011 | Holly Finn

[Dysart]

Reputation is a tricky business. And not just for politicians anymore. This year we're all worried about approval ratings—or should be. Reputation was once a qualitative measure of our behavior, vital but vague. Now it's getting quantitative. Soon there is likely to be an actual numerical reputation score for each of us, like a FICO credit score but for our whole lives.

Ready?

We've got the precursors now, whether or not we're aware of them. Companies such as PeerIndex, Twitalyzer, Talentag and PostRank (bought by Google) already apply online analytics to establish the heft of an individual's or business's "social capital." This means, broadly, your influence online. How many people do you reach and how many of them take action based on what you say? Are you a preacher or a wallflower?

There seem to be endless proprietary mechanisms for measuring social capital. Each company uses a different combination of metrics (they're cagey about the specifics). Twitter assigns a reputation score to every user as part of their "Who to Follow" formula. A start-up called Klout, founded in 2008, has something more public in mind.

[Dysart]

"Character is like a tree and reputation like a shadow. The shadow is what we think of it; the tree is the real thing." Honest old Abraham Lincoln knew what he was talking about. Just imagine his reputation score. But today, even his shadow would look longer.

[Dysart]

Stupid title. The useful bit of info from the article is the FICO-like score that is/will be attached to your online reputation culled from various social activities. Think about that next time one of your bad jokes or hyperbolic comments is misconstrued.

[BenKenobi]

Suspending Habeaus Corpus will do that for you.

[JRandomFreeper]

I don't need google's help. I can trash my rep on my own.

I'm not running for office. ;)

/johnny

[Loyal Sedition]

And to think, I used to wonder why people used “Screen Names” instead of their real names.

Now I wonder if I should use a redirecting service to blur my tracks!

My “Digital signature” is pretty small by modern standards, no be a Twit on twitter, no abandon ALL privacy on face-book, no Linkidn, etc.

Looks like I may have to abandon more forums though.

If I stated my full derision of these companies exploiting us like this I would be banned.

[JSteff]

Google divisions catch other google division spiking search results for themselves.
How can you trust them when they control the search biz are cheating on it themselves?

http://www.searchnewz.com/topstory/news/sn-2-20120112GoogleCaughtBuyingPaidLinks.html

It is a bit esoteric but interesting, just be sure to read the links off the story for even more on the story. If they caught themselves cheating it is like the government cheating on IRS taxes from inside the IRS.
Leaves one wondering (as complicated as it is), how many of their other search results are all bogus too? In other words when you search for something does it really present the best search result, or a google skewed result? Possibly favoring a google product or a friends of google result?

Trusting the fox in the hen house thing again.. just more convoluted and much more complicated.

[cynwoody]

O/T: I came across a new search engine recently: duckduckgo.com

[Dysart]

Thanks! I’ve been trying to remember that one which was recommended to me sometime ago and I never bookmarked. I am this time.

[Dysart]

Esoteric indeed, but illuminating just the same. As for whether or not Google routinely skews search results as you wonder, only al-gor-ithm knows and he ain’t talking.

[JSteff]

whether or not Google routinely skews search results as you wonder,

Makes you think the are running it like a news station or a book making operation. "Hey guys we dot a bidder on the keyword "XXX" and they are bidding $$$ for us to make baby cats show up on all searches for "cute kids"....should we take it or give the false keyword "cure kids" search result to "dogs vomiting?" (Ought to be a hoot).

And so the next 20 pages of search cute kids will now show as pages of dogs vomiting.
Can you see the problems that would cause??? Quite a conundrum. If Google can't be trusted, who can?

[HiTech RedNeck]

This kind of ill thought out keyword correction can show up in AdWords ads. I’ve seen it happen, an ad coming up which assumes what I typed was a typo (even though it was not a typo and even Google knew better because it was matching my search terms exactly and finding lots of results). I’ve seen little evidence that it would punk main Google results.

[HiTech RedNeck]

Fortunately for the thinking public, rivals like yahoo and bing (and esoterics like teoma) are there too, and serve as a quick check as to whether Google is hiding something that ought to be obvious to it. As well as Dogpile, which merges the results of several independent search engines.