Slashdot Mirror
The Reality of Online Reputation
Nicholas Carroll (of Why Unicode Won't Work On The Internet fame) has written a piece for Mindjack entitled "Spinning The Web: The Realities of Online Reputation Management". Trust me - the actual subject matter is a lot more interesting then the title *grin*. The essay is aimed toward companies online, but is applicable to individuals as well.
Especially when I am hiring. I learn more about people and companies via Google than via resume's and marketing-heavy websites.
Granted, I take everything I read on the Internet* with a grain of salt, but information, no matter the source, is helpful in decision making.
*Even /.! For example, the "selfish routing" story from last week. Anyone who knows BGP4 knows that article, and 99% of the comments about it were unalduterated and misinformed BS.
It's funny you should say that, because I think this is a big part of the reason online fora like slashdot have such a high lurking rate. Most readers here never post, just as has always been true on mailing lists and Usenet. There's only a small core of vocal posters (the 80-20 rule, except it's more like 98-2 here).
So if people were less concerned, slashdot would have even more posts than it does. You could raise an interesting debate about whether the steady climb in posts has been due to increased readership, or increased participation (or more accurately, how those components boil down).
The thing that has always struck me about people is that even though most of them HAVE opinions they're not always prone to sharing those opinions. It's the way that everyone has an opinion about poilitics and yet still only a fraction of the populace votes.
Of course a lot of silence is in people online not wanting to chime in expressedly with a "Me Too!" opinion in the presence of a well expressed position that already outlines what they would say themselves if they only could spell, write with some skill, etc. It's the nice thing about the Anonymous Cowards system at Slashdot that people can, if they'd like, post whatever weird or netiquette violating opinion anonymously without slipping in their own opinion like a bad walk with your dog.
In the end though, I think the success of an online forum's credibility and reputation depends on a couple of factors. Slashdot is very geek/tech/IP heavy in content and slant. Everyone is surprised when someone speaks out in favor of Microsoft on Slashdot even when probably 80% of the readership uses Windows at some point in a day. The **IAA's are ridiculed and revealed at Slashdot, and if we don't always hear about the neatest new gizmo from Slashdot we at least know that in the culture of Slashdot that if someone has retailed a Linux machine Vibrator that SOMEONE at Slashdot has purchased the beast and will eventually post a review on how penguins are in bed. I don't think anyone comes to Slashdot for reviews on cars, because posters at Slashdot aren't perceived as being particularly of the greasemonkey/NASCAR set usually. People will have an opinion on which spark plugs are best at Slashdot but it will be weighted against the idea that the average posters would have less real experience than say the mass of people at a classic car forum.
One of the advantages of traditional media is that even if we can know that Dan Rather probably doesn't know much about Hot Air Ballooning, we all know that before he speaks out on a story about Hot Air Ballooning that at least someone from the news department has at least implied that they have made an effort to research the sport. Of course, that implication turns on them when they don't know what they're talking about anyways but everyone should know by now that the grains of salt size difference between CNN and a random internet poster is large.