Steve Smith has an interview with Matt Colebourne, CEO of CoComment, a service that tracks comments across the Web so that companies can see what people are saying about them. “We are looking at how we can help a community find its own experts,” says Matt. He writes about the next version of the product:

So they can look at a conversation stream of tens of thousands of comments and say, I only want to see those answered by people that I know. But then it is useful if you can start to pick up on the individuals who have natural authority on the topic. So we are building a ranking system or a behavioral system where people rate other people. But after a while, once the experts start appearing, they in turn should be able to bring other people up quickly. So an expert on medieval history can see I actually do have something to say on it and give me a positive ranking. That will give me a much higher rank than someone else who knows nothing about it. So it is like a peer review and commenter ranking system, but against the taxonomy of topics that allows the natural experts to appear.

Interesting.

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