Your blog is quality.

Both are valuable. How can you combine the two?

1. Display your FriendFeed content on your blog using an embeddable widget:

2. Display your latest Twitter updates on your blog with a customized widget:

3. Combine the display of RSS feeds from FriendFeed and Twitter and elsewhere using an RSS plugin on your WordPress, Blogger, Moveable Type or TypePad blog.

4. Install Fresh From FriendFeed and Twitter – a WordPress plugin that keeps your blog always fresh by regularly adding your best recent content from FriendFeed or Twitter. Unlike the above solutions that only display content, Fresh From allows your visitors to search your micro-blogging content, and allows you to easily edit, tag and turn it into regular blog posts. Disclosure: I wrote this plugin, it got me thinking about this post.

5. Going the other way, FriendFeed makes it easy to import your blog’s RSS feed into FriendFeed.

6. Make sure your blog’s feed is using Media RSS extensions if you can, so FriendFeed picks up any media attachments. There are a couple of WordPress plugins available that achieve this.

7. You can import your blog’s RSS feed into Twitter using services such as twitterfeed and RSS To Twitter:

8. Alex King’s Twitter Tools is a WordPress plugin that creates a tweet on Twitter whenever you post in your blog, with a link to the blog post. It can also create a daily or weekly digest post of your tweets on your blog.

9. Glenn Slaven’s FriendFeed Comments WordPress plugin will take the comments & ‘likes’ on your posts from FriendFeed and place them on the post that they’re related to on your blog.

10. If you are using the Disqus comment system on your WordPress, Blogger, Moveable Type or TypePad blog, comments can now be synchronised between your blog and FriendFeed.

What have I missed out? Comments please!

Google’s PageRank algorithm does a good job of measuring the quality of a simple web page, based on the number of incoming links to that page, and recursively weighted on the quality of those linking pages. However, web2.0 has given us blogs, wikis, forums, media sharing, customer product reviews and ratings, social bookmarking, and more recently aggregation of all of the above; resulting in web pages that contain an increasingly complex array of UGC and UGR, making it increasingly difficult for algorithms, and site visitors and site owners to filter the signal from the noise, the UGC from the UGR.

So I wanted to write a post about some of the emerging technology innovations attempting to solve this problem. Readers are kindly asked to add a comment at the bottom of the post. All comments will be shown, even bad poetry, for purposes of research and experimentation.

Measuring quality is relatively easy for eBay. Its Feedback Ratings provide an excellent indicator of trustworthiness, because online auctions involve measurable user actions such as ‘Was the product description accurate?’ and ‘Did the buyer pay up?’ Such actions speak louder than the mere words of a blog comment or product review.

Amazon now owns a valuable database of customer product reviews to help people through their purchasing decisions. Innovation by Amazon in this area has included the ability to provide feedback on the usefulness of other users’ comments, and a Reviewer Rank algorithm which provides a measure of reviewer quality (interestingly, this algorithm was recently improved to include some PageRank-like recursiveness).

In a past life I had the pleasure of working for Lonely Planet, a travel publisher whose credibility and quality has been built upon the independence of its authors and their unbiased travel reviews. Lonely Planet and its peers have long struggled with the opportunity to harvest UGC from loyal and passionate travelers, because it is just so difficult to measure the independence and quality of contributing users.

TripAdvisor was allowed to emerge as a disruptive force in the market for travel advice, allowing anybody to review any hotel or restaurant. That created a lot of quality content for a while, but ever since hotel owners found out about TripAdvisor and began to review their own hotels, it’s been difficult to tell the UGC and UGR apart. TripAdvisor still desperately needs a reliable measure of user generated quality to restore its credibility.

Perhaps social networking can help TripAdvisor; being able to filter your travel advice to that written only by your friends would eliminate biased reviews (unless you are friends with a bunch of hotel owners, in which case you’re probably going to stay in their hotel anyway). But until the internet settles on a standard for social data portability, not many of us will have enough online friends who have traveled enough and generated enough online travel content for such a social filter to work reliably, even allowing for recursive algorithms.

If it’s just travel advice and inspiration you’re looking for, you could wait for Lonely Planet’s upcoming blog syndication feature, which promises a novel solution to the problem.

But more generally, I think we all need a universal reputation system, one which aggregates lots of measures of quality from lots of different sites. Imagine if you could easily see a summary of my quality metrics from eBay and Amazon and Yahoo Answers and LinkedIn Answers and GetSatisfaction, perhaps even my Bugzilla and Basecamp metrics too; would that be enough for you to trust my travel advice and any other content that I generate?

Site visitors would benefit from increased visibility of users who generate content. Genuine contributors would be encouraged by being able to build a universal reputation for quality UGC, and discouraged from the risk of creating UGR. And site owners would benefit from data to filter out the UGC from the UGR.

A universal reputation system could also help to eliminate online vote rigging, astro-turfing (all those reviews of iPhone apps posted by the developers themselves), and space-faking (setting up false identities on social networking sites).

Who are the players?

	SezWho provides a plugin for blog commentary which presents a useful summary of UGC history for each contributor, and allows customizable 5-point rating scales for site owners.
	Intense Debate has a great interface design. It’s recently been acquired by Automattic, the owners of the WordPress blogging platform, which will provide some valuable distribution, perhaps critical mass. But will the other blogging platforms want to adopt or integrate with a standard controlled by a competitor?
	Google Friend Connect allows any site to embed a comments or ratings gadget onto any page. The universal view of previous UGC is not there yet, however this will become powerful when integrated fully with Google’s other stuff; Blogger and SearchWiki and the Social Graph API and YouTube (arguably the site most in need of a UGR filter!)
	Disqus is getting lots of press for its prompt Facebook Connect integration which takes the hassle out of commenting. Video comments can by posted, powered by Seesmic. Readers can nudge comments up and down the list by voting on them. Try it out below.

If you have a view on who will win the race to become the universal reputation system, please comment below. Are there any other players that I have missed out? (Yes I know that is exposing me to some comments on the quality of this post!)

Also here’s some further questions to inspire some commentary:

• Should we settle on a word for what is being measured here? Quality, importance, value, trust, reputation, credibility, honesty, transparency? Or will the winner of the race provide a web2.0 brand name to describe this concept of a universal measure of user generated content?
• Is it even possible to determine an objective universal score? The success of PageRank would suggest yes. Or is quality in the eye of the beholder? Is one person’s signal another person’s noise?
• Would a universal metric destroy the democratic level playing field that is UGC / UGR?
• What are the consequences of such a universal reputation system being gamed?
• How likely are eBay and Amazon to open up their reputation data? What are the privacy implications?

Thoughts please. Don’t be shy!