Measuring Reputation

Plato considered the role of "guardians", elite members of society distinguished by their ability to do greater good or greater harm. The archetype of the "philosopher king" - a great and worthy ruler whose wisdom in governance and service to society safeguards the utopian Republic - comes our of his description of perfected treatment of these guardians, who must complete extensive education and public service to be considered as rulers.

How do we identify the elites in our own society? The United States do not have rulers per se, but we do have our celebrities. You've heard of "A list" and "B list" and so on -- how do we know who's hot and who's not? The media has always played a role. With the rise of new media, such as the internet, we may develop new ways to measure reputation. What are the potential benefits and harms of such developments?

Remember that reputation is not exclusive to individuals; the reputation of companies (who are afforded many of the same legal rights as individuals in contemporary society) is arguably as important. Whether or not we each ever have a personal reputation score that can be checked like a credit score, it's likely there will be methods developed to measure to reputation of companies and the economic value of that reputation.

Again, I encourage you to imagine extreme scenarios along with those that might be considered reasonable. If you have an opinion about what could or should happen, carefully consider alternatives to it in addition to developing your own favorite perspective.

Online Reputation Is Hard To Do
http://slashdot.org/articles/07/06/03/1947227.shtml

Symblized writes "A new article from InformationWeek argues that not only does the Web need ways to verify identity, it also needs better ways to measure reputation . The article uses Digg, Wikipedia, and eBay as examples and muses whether their models could be applied more widely. There's also a profile of Opinity, a company that tried to introduce a reputation system and didn't make it. Choice quote from a source in the article: 'The idea of a transferable, semantic reputation is identity nirvana.'"