"PageRank assigns a reputation score to the URL where content is published. This makes it a great fit for content that stays put in one location. However, evolving content distribution via blogs, RSS, guest columns, and syndication are a challenge for PageRank. Tweets, retweets, micropublishing, ratings, and comments - even bigger problems. The solution lies in associating reputation with the identity of the author - a PageRank for People." - Leo Laporte from Bookmarklet

Reminds me of "wuffie" where personal reputation replaces monetary wealth in Cory Doctorow's DOWN AND OUT IN THE MAGIC KINGDOM. - Liam Watts

I love that comic. Makes me chukle every time. - Roberto Bonini

Doctors are catching on to this and have slipped a "patient will not post online comments about doctor" clause into their standard forms. You don't even know you've agreed to it unless you read the whole thing, and who does that? - jjjobst

Desirable, but immensely difficult: how do you define a "person" for rank purposes? We are talking here about a huge collection of disparate things. And, what if, contrary to the online reputation, the real reputation sucks? - Nikos Anagnostou

Agree that we need a soltion for this but a Nikos touches upon is need to agree definitions of scope. Others male valid point also some further discussion and thinking required. - Najeeb Mirza

PersonRank tied to (possibly) OpenId anyone? ...Everytime I click „Like“ FF brain is assigning whuffie to the author of a message. - Mindaugas Dagys

Great analogy Liam. Loved that book. - dthree

Doesn't Googles Sentiment Analysis a step in the right direction? It infers sentiment to rank http://www.seobythesea.com/... and “service,” “value,” and “general comments.” Aspects are defined in one of Google’s papers on sentiment analysis as “properties of an object that can be rated by a user.” Unfortunately, Google is attempting to Patent this process. - Greg

"But you shouldn't !" - Ryo / Fuck Facebook

Yup. This made me think of "Down and out in the Magic Kingdom" too. If you haven't read it, it's worth it. - Chad McCoskey

I would say not desirable - relevance is highly relative when it comes to people, and frankly anything that ranks people by the noise they make online and how many people they can get to claim they are great... will produce the wrong kind of behaviour - Joelle Nebbe (iphigenie)

I agree with Joelle, mostly. The exceptions would be for trolls and spammers -- it's too much work to be on a constant lookout for trolling, and I'd really like to have an automatic metric which would enable me to automatically filter out such rubbish. - Nathaniel Thurston

leo: yes indeed, and such a content filter would work well by taking into account the distance through the social graph between the author and each reader, rather than using a fixed measure of the author's reputation for all readers. - Bob Hitching from fftogo

But I think it's more fair to rank a document, than a person. This is something we shouldn't do at all. - Ryo / Fuck Facebook

Nathaniel - I might agree for spammers, but "trolls" are a difficult thing. Many game changing people were labelled troublemakers first, today we'd call them trolls... - Joelle Nebbe (iphigenie)