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I was actually thinking about a startup idea around this general theme. I'm going to share it with Hacker News, tell me what you think. I do not think reputati

I was actually thinking about a startup idea around this general theme. I'm going to share it with Hacker News, tell me what you think. I do not think reputation should be owned by a single site because unlike social networking, there are going to be lots of places to contribute to your online presence. Yes, stack overflow is important when trying to hire a programmer, but I have also looked at blogs, twitter, github projects, etc. What really needs to happen is for a startup to create a way to aggregate activity online into a central location to disseminate to the world. Blogging made sense as a means to communicate an idea in 2001, but 10 years later, this needs to change. The internet is shifting heavily towards one that is more focused on communities and the interactions in that community are what are most reflective of an internet identity/reputation. Just think about your own lives. Yes, sometimes you have one off ideas that you would love to blog and tweet about. That's great, you should keep doing that. But I bet you are also dropping bombs of wisdom on various sites like Quora, Hacker News and Stack Overflow that you wish you could share with more people and keep in a more permanent place. There needs to be a central place to disseminante the highlights of an online presence. And that site should own the online reputation.

adrianwaj 16y ago
It's not hard to display online reputations side by side on a resume. Reputations mean different things to different people, according to different contexts.
gojomo 16y ago
This has been tried in several eras; there was an initiative 'OpenPrivacy' (folding around 2002) that wanted a standard for portable profiles and reputations, and this also seemed to me the original focus of RapLeaf. More recently, about.me (acquired by AOL) and flavors.me have tackled one portion of this, the user-controlled aggregation of their multiple presences. There may still be prospects for a new service, though the resistance of existing reputation silos could be a problem.
- charlesju 16y ago
  These are not addressing the same problem, which is that we're shifting from a stand alone idea sharing platform model to a community idea sharing platform model that needs consolidation from the inherent fragmentation of the ecosystem (Quora, Hacker News, etc.) I think those are all trying to tackle a subtle difference than what I am talking about. About.me and Flavors.me is more so about one off content creation and status profile sites (blogs, twitter, linkedin, facebook). What I'm saying is that things like Quora, Hacker News, are now becoming the preferred medium to share ideas as opposed to standalone sites. Many Quora answers are essentially blog posts.

adrianwaj 16y ago

It's not hard to display online reputations side by side on a resume. Reputations mean different things to different people, according to different contexts.

gojomo 16y ago

This has been tried in several eras; there was an initiative 'OpenPrivacy' (folding around 2002) that wanted a standard for portable profiles and reputations, and this also seemed to me the original focus of RapLeaf. More recently, about.me (acquired by AOL) and flavors.me have tackled one portion of this, the user-controlled aggregation of their multiple presences. There may still be prospects for a new service, though the resistance of existing reputation silos could be a problem.

charlesju 16y ago
These are not addressing the same problem, which is that we're shifting from a stand alone idea sharing platform model to a community idea sharing platform model that needs consolidation from the inherent fragmentation of the ecosystem (Quora, Hacker News, etc.) I think those are all trying to tackle a subtle difference than what I am talking about. About.me and Flavors.me is more so about one off content creation and status profile sites (blogs, twitter, linkedin, facebook). What I'm saying is that things like Quora, Hacker News, are now becoming the preferred medium to share ideas as opposed to standalone sites. Many Quora answers are essentially blog posts.