Mollom

A while ago I wrote about spam, OpenID and Mollom. I mentioned that at Mollom we are maintaining an internal reputation for OpenID identifier that we encounter while assessing submitted content. In addition to that, we could also asses the reputation of the OpenID identify provider (IdP), which is useful in its own right.

It is still early days, but I believe that any identify system (i.e. OpenID) needs a reputation component (i.e. Mollom). I also believe that any reputation system needs to be able to establish an identity first.

Mollom's reputation system tries to predict future behavior by looking at past behavior. To do this, Mollom keeps track of past behavior, and updates the behavior as it receives more data about the user. At the same time, Mollom forgets. In other words, one must consistently behave well to maintain a good reputation.

At Mollom, we plan to open up our reputation system through an API (i.e. mollom.getReputationIdentity('http://john.myopenid.com')) or mollom.getReputationProvider('http://myopenid.com')), but before we do, I'd like to solicit some feedback and invite people to participate.

Nothing drives API design better than concrete use cases and experiments in the field. How would you like to consume reputation information? What format should we use so reputation information from different sources can be combined? How can your application help us build and maintain reputation profiles? How do we prevent abuse?

I don't expect that we can answer these questions overnight, but if you want to collaborate or prototype a few ideas, let us know. Should be fun!

Microsoft developers are jumping over the walls here at the Mollom headquarters! Tom Adriaenssen also wrote a Microsoft .NET library for Mollom; see Tom's announcement. While Jelle's .NET library for Mollom uses the Microsoft Public License, Tom's library ships with a MIT license -- both are approved by the Open Source Initiative (OSI). We added both libraries to the Mollom download page. Hopefully dasBlog and DotNetNuke plugins will follow soon. Oh, and we could use some ASP.net controls too! Anyone working on those?

Friend of the family, Jelle Druyts wrote a Microsoft .NET library for Mollom. Jelle and I went to the same high school. I've kept up with Jelle over the years and consider him to be on the forefront of everything Microsoft. I've never had the opportunity to work closely with Jelle until more recently, when Jelle offered to contribute a .NET library for Mollom. Jelle's thinking and diligence wowed me -- and best of all, he is still the warm and fun human being that he was in high school. Check out Jelle's announcement for more details. Thanks, Jelle!

Andy Georges released a Python wrapper for Mollom. The wrapper can be used to integrate Mollom in your Python applications, but it also gets Mollom one step closer to the Django project. Thanks Andy!

We're happy to announce that Ruby Master Jan De Poorter of Openminds, wrote a Ruby Gem for Mollom. You can get the Gem from http://mollom.rubyforge.org/. Jan told me that a Ruby on Rails plugin is on its way, so keep an eye on Jan's development blog. Rock on, Openminds!