Negative Feedback on eBay

I was reading Jordan's blog post about online reputations and it mentioned eBay and the fear to leave negative feedback. This is a valid point and a problem with eBay's feedback system. It seems to limit the course of action a buyer has to tell others that the seller is not a good seller. However, it also prevents buyers from leaving frivolous negative feedback because the item they purchased did not meet their standards. While sometimes a product will arrive to a buyer in a condition that is significantly worse than it was described in the auction listing, however, if the buyer has a standard higher than what the seller is describing and it doesn't meet that standard, it's not the fault of the seller. The way eBay's feedback system works does favor sellers but it serves to limit frivolous complaints. And as a strictly business decision, it makes sense for eBay to favor the sellers--they're the ones paying the listing fees!

eBay Feedback

Howard Rheingold's point in Smart Mobs about how eBay's feedback system works is very true today, as it was in 2002 when this book was published. He uses Paul Resnick's three points about how a "reputation system" works to show why eBay's system works: buyer's and seller's identities are long-lived, feedback is visible to others (potential buyers and sellers) in the futur and that people pay attention to the ratings. Rheingold believes that part of why the system actually works is because people have faith in it and trust what it shows.

I've worked for an eBay business, PeriodPaper, for several years and the owner and all the employees are very proud that with over 4000 unique feedback left, zero have been negative. To Troy Ylitalo, the president of PeriodPaper, his business' online reputation is everything. He values customer service above all else and really goes out of his way to treat his customers with great respect. This is evident in every aspect of his business, even down to the packaging he uses to ship products out. This care and attention to the customers' needs are apparent in his feedback rating. And, because of his high online eBay reputation level, PeriodPaper is able to draw in new customers at a very high rate (4000 feedback represent unique users and there are nearly 5900 total feedback received--the higher number includes repeat and multiple-item buyers).

Would you want a cop to blog?

I went for a drive tonight and wound up on Georgia Ave driving from the Beltway into DC. While I was driving down the street, I saw a lot of police cars... some that I thought were going to hit my car while they were racing somewhere, some that I thought were going to pull me over and others that were already busy with work. It made me think of an earlier class we had where employees blogging about their company's and workdays came up and it was asked "what do they have to hide by not blogging?" I'd like to know, would you really want to know what a law enforcement officer does on his/her shift everyday? What about a correctional officer in a prison? Maybe I've got the wrong look on blogging since I'm not a business major but I think there are certain jobs that blogs would not fit very well.

Street Blogging

I think Howard Rheingold's point about how powerful street blogging could become is a very valid point. To be able to upload a short text message from your mobile phone to the web in near-real time is incredibly powerful. Photos and video are even more powerful. This type of personal blogging can be useful in many different aspects of life. When my family and I packed up the rental van and drove to college to drop me off as a freshman, I used my mobile phone's camera to take lots of pictures and upload them to my blog with short captions describing where I was, what I was doing and who I was with. During those first few weeks at school, I didn't have time to sit down at my computer and blog about my daily happenings (still don't!) but I was able to use my phone to keep in touch with lots of friends without having to spend much time at it. This was before video phones were easily accessible but I don't think a video would've served much more useful a purpose. I feel that short video clips throughout my day would require me to spend more time on text explanations or longer clips with an audio commentary--not very feasible.

Another way that mobile street blogging is incredibly powerful are in instances of crisis and catastrophe. When the London Underground was bombed in July 2005, many of the first images of the bombing were published on blogs via mobile phones taking photos and videos of the destruction. Other recent events, including the aftermath of the December 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami and Hurricane Katrina, have seen mobile blogging with pictures and videos getting "out" into the world's view before traditional media could do so.

Even Facebook Blogs

When I was reading the Financial Times article on blogging and corporate America, I remembered when facebook introduced the News Feed feature. Facebook introduced the new feature without telling anyone how it worked, how to adjust the privacy settings, and pretty much just made it the easiest way to tell any kind of change in someone else's Facebook profile. Within hours of the feature launch, hundreds of thousands of facebook users had created and joined groups protesting the feature. Within a day or so, the facebook creator wrote in the corporate facebook blog that they'd messed up in launching the News Feed without providing adequate information about it. Within days of that blog post, facebook users were provided with very detailed privacy controls for the News Feed and learned what exactly could and could not be appear on others News Feeds about themselves. The article said that it was blogs that were driving forces in changing corporations practices but in the case of this very popular social-networking website, the blog was used as the means to show change was happening. Maybe that's one way blogs can be used... similar to Hardee's advertising campaign that their burgers were terrible--companies can use blogs to admit mistakes and show honest attempts at improvement.

The Internet Beat Game Theory

In Smart Mobs I think it's interesting that the Internet was created in a way that "self-interest and public goods were identical." This allowed the original hackers that created the Internet to put lots of hard work, creativity and energy into something that was both immediately useful to them and would eventually become incredibly useful and valuable to the public as a whole. By combining the self-interest and public good into one creation, the Internet beat all game theory that trumps the public good for self-interest. I don't really understand how this happened, other than through deliberate decisions and forethought by its creators, but I think it was vital to allowing the Internet to become as large and powerful as it is today. Much thanks is owed to those hackers both for the act of creating the easily expandable networks and for the forethought to make improvements to the 'Net both self-serving and beneficial to the public.