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I’ve update Travel Streamr so that it can now use FireEagle and it works great!  It does not store your FireEagle credentials at all, so you’d have to continually authorise.  This is intentional as I want to store as little as possible (and it’s not like it’s onerous to login to FireEagle).

Doing bits and pieces on it ad hoc. It’s just a bit of a proof of concept project, but it works quite nicely as a mobile application currently.  I wanted to generate a web application in rails that was mobile, used FireEagle and did something useful, so I came up with this at Mashed 08.

Still have to implement user uploading of text, images, audio and video (all geocoded) and using Amazon S3 so it can start to be a useful tourist/local application, but it’s getting there.

And then, when that’s all done, I’ll be adding in lots of other stuff, including geocoded advertising options, so that if you’re in a city and you’re looking for stuff, ads for restaurants and hotels may come up.  Cheap ad options are very very simple.

The API is still “non-commercial” though so until that changes, I can’t make money on this.

Note: Already have the code for S3 because I built another proof of concept called deadparrotimages a while back, which is a temporary image store.  Images are deleted after an hour or a day.  I thought it would be useful to send round images that you don’t want saved on the net forever, something like when selling an item and you don’t want everyone to know about it.

One of the things I dislike about online “communities” is that there is often a nastiness that comes along with the interaction. The fact that you don’t have to meet a person to be in a dialogue with them means that you can pretty much say what you like. The gloves are off.

One of the things I really like about online “communities” is that there is often an openness and honesty that comes along with the interaction. You find out a bit more about the real person and some friendships can be created and massively enhanced because of the interaction.

It’s an inherent contradiction that the openness of the internet allows both openness and nastiness.  The worst part of this is that people online will often make assumptions about a person’s ideas or beliefs, and act on that understanding. The reaction of others can often taint a person online, especially in the age of “search” where nothing online gets hidden.

You can’t change other people, you can only change how you react.  If you don’t like the idea of the community being that open, then don’t become a part of it. Dialoguing is sometimes useful, but there can often become a point where it just brings both down in the estimation of everyone who views the interaction.

Reputation Management is a term that has started to appear because of this openness.  I first heard it about 2 years ago in relation to online, where a person in one of my online business networks started offering a service to get a person’s Google search results changed. It meant that things that were undesirable (including negative comments) were pushed down the list and replaced with a more positive view of that person, but the negative things could not be eradicated. It’s spin for the internet generation. Wikipedia founder, Jimmy Wales, is an interesting case of poor reputation management in the fracas with his girlfriend.  Internet spin gone wrong!

I like the idea of reputation management, but I also find it slightly disingenuous. Part of what attracts people is the “warts and all” interactivity of the net. The fact that people/companies with spare cash can in some way portray a positive view of themselves is good sense in a business world, but a person with no skeletons is much more scary than a person with a few. In my view, it’s a balancing act.

What I much prefer is to be able to find other people’s views of a person (or company). If their view of that person is positive then I am going to be more favourable to that view than of the person’s “spin”. Kind of like an Amazon rating for people.

The problem with an amazon rating is that there are many types of people on the internet. Books are different, because the content of the book means that only certain types of people are going to read it. Books on C# will be read by techies. Mills and Boon by women of a certain age.  So the ratings are going to be from people with similar interests.  People are a different matter. They are a part of different groups and have different aims.  So how do you judge their rating?

You have to find people who know that person for the same reason as you may want to. In business that’s quite simple - to use their services or find out about them as a prospective client. That’s why businesses try so hard to get testimonials from their clients. However, they control those testimonials and what you see.  You never, ever see the bad bits.

When you are in an online community with someone, you have the opportunity to find out another person’s reputation from their interactions with others. Most communities have a friends list, and you can find those connections to you.  It’s the idea behind LinkedIn, because you are constantly working through your contacts to find other contacts, a partial trust has appeared, but there’s no rating. I like this approach to a point, but it attracts the wrong type of people in my view. People with a big contact base (sales people generally) mean you end up with a bunch of people all trying to get the biggest number of contacts.

In the end, the best way to manage a business reputation is for a company is for it to be the best it can be and to be clear about what it does. The community around it will then speak out loud about it, and the nay-sayers will be available but will be just noise.  That kind of reputation, where the negative is available, but outweighed by the positive says more about that company than any kind of management of what is visible.

Lots said… need to work!  I’ll probably talk about the idea of followership in my next blog… this one’s got too long!