Building Web Reputation Systems That Add Value to an Online Enterprise

Building Web Reputation Systems can drastically enhance the value and relevance of the content on your website. In fact, the deployment of these systems has played a major role in the success of industry heavyweights such as EBay, Amazon, Slashdot, and Xbox Live. These systems essentially work by highlighting the best user generated comments/content and rewards users for their contributions.

Reputation systems allow users to vote for their favorite products/services and content. Users are also allowed to write reviews that are related to the website content or products, as well assign rankings to these products/content.

Popular Reputation Models Online

Vote to Promote - Has been effectively deployed by sites such as Yahoo! Buzz, Reddit, and Digg that depend on user submitted news. Viewers vote for articles that are of use to them. The number of votes received by the item determines its ranking and visibility.

Favorites - This is a relatively straightforward system that checks the number of times a particular content item has been bookmarked by visitors. Determining relevance and reputation through this method is particularly useful.

Ratings - Some reputation systems allow visitors to express their opinion regarding the quality of content available on the website. The use of a ‘Thumbs Up’, Bars, or Stars allows users to assign a definite value to the item under judgment.

Reviews - are a more complex form of reputation system that usually require the reviewer to rate certain factors before submitting a textual opinion on a particular item

Factors to Consider When Building Web Reputation Systems

Building Web Reputation Systems that have relevance and authenticity can be quite a complex process. There are several inherent issues that must be tackled in order to ensure their success. This is applicable to almost any type of reputation system that has achieved a certain level of user interaction. The sheer volumes of data generated can be difficult to deal with and the scalability of a system must be considered before deployment.

Not all the information generated is likely to have the same quality or value. As a result, there must be a system in place that can distinguish relevant information from contributions without any real substance. This is easier said than done, and in practical terms a qualitative analysis of the information coming in to your site can be difficult to implement.

Another factor that needs to be addressed is a sustainable reward policy that encourages contributions, and provides an incentive to your better contributors to return and share their opinions.

One technique that has overcome these problems is to recognize the contributions of regular users by awarding them reputation points based on the volume and quality of the content generated by them.

Moderating any form of user input is also an important issue and due attention must be paid to this issue. There are always people that are likely to abuse this process to promote selfish interests or introduce links (spam) that have no relevance to your site. It is necessary to consider all these issues while Building Web Reputation Systems.

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