"If a tree falls in a forest, and there's no one around to hear it, does it make a sound"? I think this is definitely a big problem that topsy or any other rep

"If a tree falls in a forest, and there's no one around to hear it, does it make a sound"? I think this is definitely a big problem that topsy or any other reputation based system will have to work around but if you're busy building amazing stuff, at some point you will be recognized, by getting lots of users talking about you, or people writing about you, etc. What makes topsy different is that the people behind it have been thinking about it for a while. From one of their previous projects: CODD is a tool for creating and analyzing statistical measures of "developer involvement" in free software projects. By assimilating authorship attribution information included in source files of a package, CODD approximates the the amount of individual contributions from developers who constructed the codebase. CODD also provides many tools for analysis of the attribution data. CODD was used in the First Orbiten Free Software Survey. It has since been extended for International Institute of Infonomics that uses CODD in open source research. via: http://vipul.net/code.html http://vipul.net/code.html