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Last week we had the distinct pleasure of meeting with Marc Smith of Microsoft research…We talked about SezWho, Reputations and online communities. We discussed how social roles are assigned and developed in online communities. Marc has written a bunch on newsgroups/forums etc. and he has identified a number of fascinating roles that are easily discernible in most newsgroups/forums kind of communities. He mentioned 8 roles like drive-by, local experts, answer people, conversationalists, fans, discussion people, flame warriors, reply magnets and trolls. His research provides a way to identify these roles based on unique signatures of these roles in terms of interactions in the communities and he showed us the Chung project for visualizing and fine tuning the models.

I wonder how these roles map into blogs or social conversations like twitter and forums and wikis etc. happening right now across sites? Do these concepts still apply?

Regular readers of this site would recognize that we dig stuff like what Marc is working on as it helps us improve/fine tune the best reputation engine for the social web (so much for modesty ). In the past we have written about the 90-9-1 rule…It looks like this research fits pretty well with the 90-9-1 rule and even provides models to identify different kind of participants. I can’t wait to set up the models to run some analysis to identify how we can use them to improve community engagement.