Essay: Navigating the River of Life
“I feel like I’m floating down the river of life instead of navigating it.” That little gem came from one of my early- twentysomething sons about a month ago as we were doing a little instant messaging in the middle of the afternoon. MORE–>>
Essay: How Big is Yours?
One of my sons asked me recently how much money I had in my retirement accounts. “I’m embarrassed to say,” I told him… My financial insecurity has been as troublesome as my sexual insecurity over the years. Like a lot of guys I know, I’ve hauled around lots of emotional cargo in my wallet, bank accounts, and–now that I finally have a puny one–stock portfolio. MORE–>>
I’ve spent a good chunk of time in the past week trying to decide which message board platform to go with. John Hatch and I are looking closely at Slashcode because of its built-in reputation management capabilities, but it really requires someone far more technically literate than me to even install and run it, not to mention adapt it.
After talking with David Woolley about Web Crossing, I’ve pretty much decided to go with it. I can get going with it pretty quick by myself and David is pretty confident that he can program the reputation management stuff I need.
Essay: A Guide for Rounding the Bases
“I was rounding third and heading for home when her parents drove in the driveway.” Rounding the bases, that stage-by-stage progress toward sexual “scoring,” is a metaphor that lives on in our culture. MORE–>>
I’ve not been a very active citizen in my town of Northfield for the past 6 months. I expended a lot of effort last year leading the town’s Y2K Community Preparedness effort so I felt like taking a breather. And then starting Real Joe and all the family medical stuff came along, and well, I didn’t have the psychic energy to do much more. I stepped down as chair of Northfield Citizens Online last month and declined to take on the moderation of any special web forums until I knew more about the timing of my wife’s surgery. That’s now looking like it won’t happen till late November so yesterday I agreed to moderate a special forum on the issue of hospital location… and maybe the proposed new rec center.
I love this little town where I’ve lived for 25 years and based on what I know now, I’d like to die here. So civic involvement has increasingly mattered to me in the past 7 years or so and I have the sense that whatever I might do will live on after me, too. All my kids grew up here and I’m hoping that some or all of them might settle down here eventually.
This coming weekend is Jesse James Days, or more correctly, Defeat of JJD. When we first moved to town, it seemd a little crass and hokey like most small-town civic celebrations. But over time, I’ve grown to love it. I’m hoping that my sons, as well as my sister, brother and his family come down this weekend and maybe we can start a little tradition of some kind.
Essay: Dying a Good Death
Two years ago, my mentor (a career coach) assigned me the task of writing the eulogy for my own funeral. I thought about that assignment last week, when I attended the funeral of a friend’s mother, an 82-year-old pillar of the community, equally beloved by family and neighbors. MORE—>>
How’s this for a coincidence?
UTNE WEB WATCH DAILY The Best of the Alternative Web, 6.Sept.2000
Discuss the book “Community Building on the Web” with the author, Amy Jo Kim.
InfoAge conference, Topic 119
I’m participating because of my interest in Reputation Management (see yesterday’s weblog) and desire to somehow include aspects of it when we launch Real Joe’s message boards.
I’ve not particpated publicly in Cafe Utne for over 3 years since I left Utne Reader in early 1997. I wonder what it’ll be like?
I’ve been watching the development of reputation management capabilities within online communities for about a year now, ever since I read Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox, September 5, 1999: Reputation Managers are Happening
I took a close look at Slashdot and over the winter, watched the Motley Fool add some reputation mgmt features to their message boards.
This summer the WSJ ran a piece titled, New ‘Reputation Managers’ Earn Trust in Cyberspace and then less than a month ago, Real Communities announced their intent to include reputation management into their platform. I spoke on the phone to CEO Cynthia Typaldos and she cautioned that message boards are generally a weak component for building reputations because talking is a lot easier than doing.
I wrote her back agreeing, but that I thought there were a lot of little things that people can DO in an online community that’s primarily a message board environment:
* Providing raw participation data gives an indication of how long and how intense someone’s involvement in the community has been:
* Providing recommendation data gives an indication of someone’s popularity
* Tracking participation in other activities offers more info on a person’s
involvement:
Completing suggestion forms
and it all could add up to a significant foundation for one’s reputation.
I’d also like to have the reputation manager have personalization/collaborative filtering ability so that it could optionally guide people, for example: “members who chose Joe as their favorite also commonly listed Moe as a favorite.”
Lastly, I’d like the reputation manager to have a wide range of admin ability to fiddle with the awarding/removal of privileges, both software related and social. This area is fraught with the possibility of unintended consequences. What I might cook up as a social reward might wreak havoc among the members.
For example, I’d like for members of the community at high level of reputation be able to bring friends into the community at a higher level than an unknown stranger comes in. That might be cool but it might cause resentment. Also, some of this should be able to be automated, eg, like Slashdot, members who’ve posted at least X posts for at least a month’s duration then automatically are given the ability to create new topics and rate the posts of others.