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03/10/2008

Comments

Matt Lingard

Actually I was just miffed ;-)

I think you're right about technorati ratings and the rest giving an good overall indication. Also, as well as others nominating "significant posts", an e-portfolio approach might work well, where the individual collates their own significant posts, comments, referring posts, slideshares, YouTube vids... (and tweets, if you must!) as evidence.

Jim

Martin,

What's interesting about this is that such a reputation system as the one we gain through blogs often frames a personal element that was heretofore a bit more removed from more traditional modes publishing such as books and journals. And this is also where it might be seen as both richer more precarious.

To riff on your example, when Tony did his Feedistan post, I felt like I knew him far better from that one post (his interests, where he spends time online, etc.) than I had from many of his previous posts in which I was reminded how much I need to learn ;) And then his video mashup came out and it was equivalent to a wow! The same can be said of your mashup.

Point being, the idea of thinking in communities has become a more interactive, immediate, and personable occupation--making the very idea of reputation that much more intense than a more removed process. The precarious part has much to do with the personal element, getting "too comfortable," and trying not to always understand your spaces online as some "personal brand" --which is a term circulating that just kills me.

People exist as something more than their ideas, and the ability to manage their ideas with who they are and their variegated interests is far more interesting to me than a kind of professional face. Yet, this approach leaves a lot of room for all kinds of problems as you can probably imagine.

I have no conclusive point to draw, but simply that a significant number of the people I have worked with in a distributed manner in this online space has often led to richer and deeper professional and personal relationships than many of the relationships I have at my own institution or in grad school. Why is that? Part of it has much to do with how personal this space is, and how much you learn about people through their willingness to share online. Reputation changes from that of a statesman vs. a people, to that of people amongst people thinking together -a truly diverse group in terms of academics, interests, and geographical location.

Ok, I'll stop now. A lot of cool things to think about here.

Martin

@Matt - I think it was more than being miffed. Such lists are by their very nature 'exclusive' because everyone can't be on a list, and the blogo/twitter sphere is in contrast inclusive and democratic. But maybe if you wanted to make a case then these are indicators.

@Jim - you're just getting your own back for all those lengthy comments I leave on your blog aren't you?;) I think you are quite right - I was trying to get at some of this in my talk on 'the sweet spot' which is all the more powerful when social and professional mix. What your comment made me realise was that in traditional modes of publication we explicitly try to remove any trace of the social/personal to make it objective. Online we do the opposite and deliberately try and include some element of the personal to make it distinctive.
I don't know what this means - but trying to remove this personal/social element from your online reputation in order to establish an unbiased metric for reputation is clearly going to be a nonsense, and yet we need to avoid 'my mates think I'm good'. Hmmmm.

Manish

much interested in what you say. did see the webcast of VC's speech on the topic. They key here has to be dissemination, peer review and networking, just as in other forms of reputation building activities.

Funny enough few days ago I was thinking of arranging a conference on e-learning/blended learning and making blogs (peer reviewed) as the only method of publishing work. Then opening it to the public for their access and comments. Making the work of people live even after the event.

Blending whats existing practice in this with the web 2.0 tools that are around much more can be done I thinks.

s0apy

It's not much to say, but if you have a way of ranking the reputation of all the inputs in a system - the "testimonial" feature becomes much harder to game. It's recursive isn't it? Jim Groom's comment is worth.....anything, only if you know who he is/his reputation.

If you include "hits" - say youtube - say Wesch, you have another metric which is *very* hard to fake (I wouldn't know how to get 6,680,123 hits if I tried to - that's an almost Astley-esq number) but it is a real number.

Tony Hirst

Martin
if you're collecting stories about how institutions are starting to 'reward' (or at least, think about measuring) informal digital scholarship, here's one:
http://ericschnell.blogspot.com/2008/10/changing-academic-librarianship.html

John Beck Real Estate

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