Recently I edited Building Web Reputation Systems by F. Randall Farmer and Bryce Glass, to be published by O’Reilly Media and Yahoo! Press this March. Think of a star rating for your favorite consumer product — that’s a familiar example of a reputation system at work. But star ratings are only a small part of the story that a reputation system can tell.

Through artful construction of algorithms that process combinations of data types, it turns out that you can uncover surprising and powerful information about users’ motivations and intentions and the quality of user-contributed content on a social media site.

As an example, suppose that you’re managing an online community for parents, and you notice that in the last few days, you’ve had to delete a growing number of posts that are just advertisements or rants unrelated to the topic threads. The posts come from a number of different users, and you’ve banned some of them (the technical term for them is “trolls” ), but the problem persists.

By itself, the user ID — one type of data about people using your website — probably won’t tell you much about what’s going on. But suppose that in addition to the user IDs of the trolls, you also know the IP addresses of the computers where users are signing up for the site. When you look at the IP addresses alongside the user IDs, lo and behold, you discover… the trolls are all using the same computer! You shut down all access to the site from that computer. The problem goes away.

That’s a simple example. Through iterative design and testing, it’s possible to design complex, powerful reputation systems to handle many kinds of business problems. Depending on their purpose, these systems may have obvious, public user interfaces, or they may sort, prioritize, and act behind the scenes, unnoticed by the average user.

Author Randy Farmer, one of my colleagues at MSB Associates, coinvented many of the basic structures for both virtual worlds and social software. Bryce Glass works on Internet community products and platforms with well-known brands. Both were on the team that developed Yahoo!’s reputation platform. Read chapters of the book at buildingreputationsystems.com.

Client: F. Randall Farmer and Bryce Glass, authors (O’Reilly Media and Yahoo! Press, publishers)

Challenge: Enhance the value of input from expert reviewers of the manuscript for Building Web Reputation Systems by editing the manuscript before review.

Dutchgirl’s solution

In this book, coauthors Farmer and Glass show — with architecture and system diagrams, formulas, and a detailed case study — how to build a system that reveals surprising and powerful information about users’ motivations and intentions and the quality of user-contributed content on a site.

My edit of the manuscript allowed expert reviewers to focus on reviewing the book’s content without being distracted by problems with clarity, usage, style, spelling, or grammar.

For more details

… or to discuss your project, contact us.

“Thank you for all you have done during this project! Your knowledge and skills, your patience and persistence, your continual search for information about effective sites, and on and on… We’ve learned a lot from you and have appreciated your commitment to quality.” —Linda Hendrickson, Cascadia Community College

Client: Cascadia Community College is a feeder school for the University of Washington. It shares its state-of-the-art, wetland-lined campus with UW Bothell. The magazine Washington Monthly named Cascadia the No. 2 community college in the United States.

Challenges: Cascadia’s old website got little traffic because users found it hard to find what they needed, even if the information did exist on the site. The site did not communicate the college’s strengths or provide much information that prospective college students commonly look for. The site was both out-of-date and hard to update.

Dutchgirl’s solutions

To plan and create Cascadia’s new website, I worked with Cascadia’s marketing and communications department and dozens of members of college staff and administration, providing these deliverables:

I worked with Lisa Galley to decide what keywords to include in page titles and navigation on the redesigned Galley Eco Capital website. Here’s an example of those keywords at work in the outside world:

Lisa’s post of May 20, 2009 , on her blog Our Green Journey, links to a post on sustainability as investment at One Block Off the Grid (1BOG).

On the 1BOG post, look for the phrase “commitment to sustainability,” which we identified as a keyword phrase during the redesign of the Galley Eco Capital site. The 1BOG post links that keyword phrase back to a page on Galley Eco Capital site titled — what else — Our Commitment to Sustainability .

This keyword loop increases traffic to Galley Eco Capital’s site, improves search results, and enhances the site’s usability (by reinforcing phrases that are relevant to the site’s audience).

» More about website strategy for Galley Eco Capital