I’m afraid we’ve been involved in a much larger topic than the one we intended to address. We were thinking about the comment spam problem and we came up with a solution that we dubbed a “reputation system”.

Where the word “reputation” was intended in the very narrow context of someone that wants to write a comment to a blog post. Therefore we worked out the following functional definition of “reputation”:

• reputation is a 1 to 1 relation between the reputed party (the blog commenter) and a reputation-relying service (the blog)

• reputation is a computed value, the computation is performed by a reputation-asserting authority (the reputation manager service) from a collection of transactional data (acceptances and rejections of previous comments to other blog posts) and identity data originated by past interactions of the reputed party with reputation-relying services (other blogs).

Should this special kind of reputation being regarded as part of your identity? Dick Hardt says yes, James Kobielus and Phil Windley both say no. I prefer not to worry about this dilemma, but I’m looking forward to see the implementation of an identity 2.0 ecosystem where all these problems will find an evolutionary solution.

In the meanwhile at Clipperz, we’ll keep working on our proposal, preserving its collaborative, distributed and open essence. We are aware that most of the blogger are happy enough with other solutions based on keyword analysis, IP banning, white lists, etc.

Nonetheless we believe it’s time to verify if the blogosphere is solid enough to:

• distinguish comment spam attacks
• support bloggers during their comment review activities.

Hoping our vision is not too far-fetched …