Musings & Meanderings

In answer to the capturing traffic question on yesterday’s post and comments, I have new traffic here from SezWho.com but not from Read/WriteWeb.

As to Jitendra’s comment that one’s profile information can be edited, I clicked on that link on my profile and discovered that I needed to create an account with SezWho first. Not wanting to do this, I am only going to guess at what I’d expect to find, which is the ability to enter profile information for the benefit of anyone viewing my comments. If I could actually see the profile of who rated me, and also delete personal conversation (as discussed in yesterday’s post), I could better understand the incentive to sign up.

SezWho’s News/About Us page has links to lots of recent blog posts and articles about the service. You can also search SezWho on Technorati for another list, which is possibly how Jitendra arrived here. It might also be an interesting current search for anyone comparing search engine results.
to balance the positive coverage posts linked to on SezWho’s page above…
Geoff Livingston, a new Twitterer, tweets, “Not a good idea.” after his first encounter.

My trial comment was rated just over 2 stars. 3 is a good comment and 4 is a great comment and you can use that rating criteria to view only the best comments according to SezWho.

Objectively, I can understand why my comment, from a consumer and also business perspective but with no tech content, was not of ‘use’ or interest to the average Read/WriteWeb reader. I doubt, though, that most people will actually read all the commentary on an interesting post/topic and connect it to the star rating to form their own opinion. The comment immediately prior to mine said only, “This is such an interesting take on such a simple thing.” and received a rating of 3.5 stars. The commenter’s profile indicates that they might have been a SezWho beta tester (or closer).

Commenters who have (I assume) signed up have their website or url posted on their profile. If SezWho is actually capturing every linked posters’ traffic, though, why wouldn’t they display those posters’ websites in the profile also?

The potential of abuse with anonymous rating is what bothers me. SezWho requires entering an email address to submit a rating, but you can enter anyone’s. Being rated on Digg is not particularly invasive for those of us bloggers who aren’t mavens or seeking major traffic, although I still believe it affects all of us. Blog comments, however, or what remains of them, are somehow more intimate, and still the best potential for conversation in the public part of the blogosphere.

Last week, in a post about reputation systems, Dinesh Tantri said, “Reputation needs to be portable across the enterprise information ecosystem - a SezWho kind of distributed system for the enterprise.”

Imo, reputation also needs to be portable/aggregatable by its owner, which is related to the topic I commented on yesterday in my try out of SezWho.

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update added July 31st, 4:30 pm et

Although Jitendra posted here, I did not receive any direct or further communication, however…
The hover link has been removed completely from my name at the top of my comment (although you can still see the SezWho url, inside javascript, on the footer bar in either IE7 or Firefox)
The hover link over my name at the foot of the post has been changed completely to read verabass.blogspot.com. These changes appear to have been applied across the board.

Dear Jitendra and SezWho,
I may be just a blip of traffic in your stats, but I’m still an actual human being using services that you guys develop and promote. Respectful behavior is appreciated by people like me. It wasn’t optics that I expressed concern about, and transparency is usually a better policy.
Vera

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 31st, 2007 at 4:47 pm and is filed under Web Development, Internet Society, Ethics, Blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.