What role does reputation play on the web? Reputation and reputation systems can act as indicators of credibility, or trustworthiness, or an an indication of expertise.

* On community sites like Slashdot, a reputation system allows the highest ranked comments to rise to the top

* On sites such as Amazon, where people can review products, reputation may mean the difference between a sale, or someone moving on to another book or other reviewed product.

* On eBay, the credibilty and trustworthiness of a participant in an auction is based upon feedback for past transactions, including sales and purchases.

* At Google, links determine reputation.

Those are some of the interesting points raised in the First Monday article, Manifesto for the Reputation Society

Here are some others:

* Reputation is context specific.

* Reputations extend beyond people to companies, products, and even ideas.

* New pages don’t tend to do well in systems based upon link popularity.

* “The ‘findability’ of information biases its perceived quality”.

The paper also looks at personal reputations, and the many places where it can be built and enhanced online. Places like mailing lists, chat sites, blogs, and community sites like slashdot are venues where people can share their ideas and establish reputations.

If you’ve read other articles about reputations, and social software, you’ll have seen reference to the term “karma”. This article also delves into this metaphor, and it’s one worth pursuing. How does peer moderation work on a large community site?

How do you tell the signal from the noise? What’s the important information in a venue where many people participate? How do you add and build value? How do you increase and improve your reputation?

The design considerations described in the article can be helpful in building ecommerce sites which use reputation systems to help people sell items, and in creating a place where ideas can be exchanged, listened to, authenticated, and filtered for value, and in sites where folks can develop and display an expertise.

What role does reputation play in the sites you build or participate in?