I’ve written quite a bit before on the topic of online reputation ecosystems, and the value they bring to both businesses and consumers. However, Professor Eric Goldman – who heads the High Tech Law Institute at Santa Clara University Law School – is one of the leading authorities on the subject. Unlike many academics, Eric brings a lot of real-world experience to the discussion, and it’s always worth listening to his thoughts on this topic.

Eric has posed a very interesting deck of slides detailing the regulation of “reputation systems”, and concluding that mediated systems of reputation (e.g., Avvo’s client reviews) are inherently superior to unmediated systems (e.g., word-of-mouth or unmoderated online forums) in offering both breadth and quality of reputational information. In Eric’s formulation, the characteristics of a successful mediated system include: Translucent algorithms + robust anti-gaming enforcement + no pay-to-play, attributed sources and a right of right of reply.

Despite the fact that Avvo doesn’t offer fully-attributed sources (we feel it is important to offer those rating lawyers the option to comment anonymously), I’m glad to see that our gold-standard process for mediating client reviews meets the Goldman test.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 17th, 2010 at 1:21 pm by Josh King, VP of Business Development and General Counsel and is filed under Josh King Posts. 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.