Designing reputation and rating systems

One clear trend I’ve noticed so far from my micropayments experiment is that many people, maybe 20-30%, have been clicking more than one button on each post. I’m recording the IP address associated with each click, so I can easily see that people are doing this. The big question is why? Is it just so fun to click the shiny green buttons that you can’t resist? Can anyone offer a good explanation? Also, see TipIt , a site with a very similar concept to TipJoy . M... more

Ok, I’m just going to give up on trying to think of Internet business ideas. As regular readers will know, I’ve been thinking a bit about micropayments lately. I had two ideas regarding micropayment systems for giving tips for blogs etc: (i) Make it as simple as possible to give a tip (one click tipping); and (ii) Allow tippers to give tips on credit, and collect the bills later. I thought (i) was important to reduce transaction costs, and (... more

Blog and news aggregator Wikio has started its own ranking of blogs in competition with Technorati. Like Technorati, it’s based on the number of links between blogs, but Wikio weights links, so a link from a high-rank blog counts more than a link from a low-rank blog. They don’t say exactly how they assign these weights, nor whether they count multiple inbound links from the same blog (Technorati counts at most one per blog). Anyway, most of the econ blogs seem to be in ... more

Ask.com tried to compete with Google as an all-purpose search engine, but found that it can’t. So instead of being generic, they’ve gone for a pretty narrow niche : In a dramatic about-face, Ask.com is abandoning its effort to outshine Internet search leader Google Inc. and will instead focus on a narrower market consisting of married women looking for help managing their lives. Once you get over your shock at this dramatic change, it actually doesn’t sound like a bad ide... more