Notes &
Belkin gets caught paying for positive reviews on Amazon. Once we get passed the ethical lapse involved in the story, it will become part of a larger story about importance of identity on the web. The Belkin employee’s behavior shows just how important Facebook Connect and other consistent identification platforms will be as the web grows. People will be much less likely to claim these jobs from Mechanical Turk (and they’ll be much less likely to be advertised) if their reviews were linked back to some central and verified identification repository (which Facebook is the closest example of).
It’s the same idea behind Jeff Jarvis’ remark earlier this week about the high quality of video comments compared to written comments. As he notes, video is inherently accountable because you can’t fake it - and identity is traceable. I bet in one year, people won’t even pay attention to comments or reviews made without deeper, verified identity profiles standing behind them.
