I drank non-virtual coffee with real Lisa Williams this morning. She told me some fascinating things about improvised communities, and I told her I’m thinking about lightweight solutions to online “reputation.” Reputation avatars, if you will.
My Slashdot avatar has a gender-neutral name and excellent “karma.” My #joiito avatar uses my name and writes funny limericks. In Wikipedia, Betsythedevine writes about glacial movement and landforms (I’m from NH.) The reputation systems in these three arenas differ greatly in style and degree of formality.*
In our real lives too, we have lots of different personas for different occasions:
Lisa: And when two of our avatars collide, that’s the stuff of situation comedy.
Betsy: Yes, and of stories about “I got fired for blogging.”
Yours for more and better and funnier avatars that don’t get entangled with our credit card histories and college transcripts,
Betsy, my still-typing-darn-it avatar
* Slashdot’s reputation system is called “karma.”
Wikipedia users are kept accountable for their contributions because anybody can see anybody else’s.
Chat room users are either banned or not banned.