The emerging ideas that (ugh) “Web 3.0″ is going to materialize into the true Berners-Lee vision of a semantic, intelligent web is both an incredibly promising and partially terrifying prospect

Even the most advanced computer science has yet to truly master the simplest of human performed tasks. Thus the existence of Amazon’s, IMHO ridiculous, Mechanical Turk, which is named after the amazing-turned-fraudulent Turk unveiled in 1770 by Baron Wolfgang von Kempelen. For those unfamiliar with this Amazon service, it consists of what are called “HITs” or Human Intelligence Task that allow individuals, for a very nominal sum, to perform tasks that computers are not quite up to addressing yet. This includes such things as tagging pictures or answering questions that are exceedingly simple for humans, but present incredible difficulty for compters. Don’t get me wrong, Amazon has done a great job of setting up this program and opening up the APIs to developers to help disseminate the tasks.

A new and intereting development in the deployment of HITs (I’m using Amazon’s term as it applies to all similar tasks), is a “game” (I am at a total loss for the reference article right now, so I apologize to those who are performing the research and will add the reference as soon as I can find it) that has emerged that pits two opponents against each other in a race to identify on screen images or perform simple tasks. The duality of the experiment is that, for the participants, it provides the mind-numbing entertainment that we all need sometimes and, more importantly, behind the scenes is creating semantic tags which are, over time, building a degree of intelligence into the system that is running the game. Pretty ingenious.

So, you are probably asking yourself at this point, how in the heck does any of this have to do with your digital reputation and how you are perceived online? Well, we have seen how this theory applies to information on the Internet in the form of sites like Digg and Slashdot that allow individual users to rate news articles and “meta-moderate” what is popular versus what is a bag of digital hot air. Essentially, these sites (and their army of dedicated, if not obsessed, volunteers) enable everyday readers to quickly separate the virtual wheat from the chaff. Where we see this starting to break down to some degree is with sites like Wikipedia, where people passing themselves off as subject matter experts are corrupting the sanctity of this wonderful collective repository of information. Maybe this is an unavoidable side-effect of a truly free and open idea/information market. Maybe not.

The problem is that places like Wikipedia are not completely transparent. While the information there is available editable to everyone (well, at least everyone outside of Beijing), the information about the information, or meta-information, is not. What I mean by this is that you really have little in the way of sourcing information. If you were to read a doctorate dissertaition on particle physics, you can be darn sure that each reference will be well documented and pointing to the source, from which (if you had the time) you could find bios on all these scientists and determine a level of credibility. This is because hundreds of years of academic tradition has (rightly) determined that plagarism is one of the highest information crimes going.

The problem is that, along with everything else in the world today, the timescales of adoption are shortening so quickly that there really is no time to create traditions and a status-quo for the general, well intentioned person to live up to. We are already off the map and the virtual cartographers just can’t keep up. So, if technology is the root of this problem, technology may well be the solution. True semantic recognition by computers would allow us as consumers of information to know pretty quickly the sources and validity of what we are reading.

Unfortunately, it looks like this level of technology is unlikely to arrive in the next 10-15 years. So, a stop gap solution that allows users to meta-moderate themselves and others with minimal effort will provide an order of magnitude increase in confidence in peer-to-peer interchanges, which is where things are currently the most untrusted of media.

So to try to come full circle and pull my ramblings into a single coherent though… Yes, the Semantic Web will likely solve the identity problem for all of those who choose to exist in the virtual world. In the future, as a consumer, you are likely to never interact with someone who doesn’t have a well defined reputation, fully documented and referenced. Until we get there, generations of more complex reputation management systems need to step up to the task.

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