Friday, August 18, 2006

The other end of the anonymity scale

Lots (here, here, here ) of blog discussion on anonymity lately.

Amazon's Real Name mechanism goes to the other extreme. In order to establish confidence (dare I say 'trust') in people's online activities at Amazon (e.g. reviews), these activities are bound to their real life identity (as verified by the credit card infrastructure). Presumably, I'm less likely to do a hack job on some book if I have my real identity attached to the review.

Interesting that such real name attribution is given less weight than reputation in determining the score for a given review.

I guess the old saying "It's not who you are but who knows you" holds true.

No comments: