FAQs
General
SezWho is a distributed context, rating and reputation system for social media sites like blogs, forums, wikis, video/picture sharing sites, discussion boards and anywhere else where people collaborate on the web. Click here for more info.
How does the SezWho Plug-in integrate with my site?
A sample screen shot of a blog with the SezWho plug-in is shown below:
Yours may look different based on your theme and customizations. Some of the elements of the interface are as follows:
1. Filter Bar: Filter allows readers to quickly locate the highest rated contributions on a site.
2. Profile: Readers can hover over or click on the profile link to bring up the contributor's profile. The profile displays a list of the contributor's five latest contributions, along with the date/time of the contribution and the number of ratings and score. Optionally the contributor profile can also show information about the contributor along with a picture and a brief description. 
3. Graphical scores: The graphical scores display the content item score. See below for how these scores are generated.
4. Rating buttons: The ratings buttons allow users to rate the content item. At time of the rating, a user is asked to enter their email address in the popup shown below. 
After the rating is entered, the score is updated in real-time to reflect the changes.
How does the SezWho Service work?
The SezWho solution has three main components:
1. SezWho Plug-ins: These plug-ins allow users to rate contributions, access profile views and highlight useful content through an AJAX interface. These plug-ins are available for a number of social media platforms like blogs, wikis, discussion boards, social book marking sites etc.
2. SezWho Server: The SezWho plug-in calls a web service on the SezWho server to update the latest posts, comments and ratings. The SezWho server collects the latest interactions and calculates and sends the new reputation scores. The server also servers up the collected data as user profiles to the browser.
3. SezWho Web Portal: The SezWho web portal allows users to register and manage their public profile. In addition, it displays public profile information on users and statistics for bloggers and contributors.
Why should I register for SezWho if I am a site owner? Contributor? Reader?
Site Owner
|
Contributor
|
Readers
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Drive traffic by leveraging your community |
Good contributions are rewarded by building reputation |
Makes it easy to find quality user generated content |
Increase community interactions and engagement |
Recognizes quality contributors as leaders in the community |
Enables readers to evaluate and follow quality contributors |
Leverage old content |
Portable reputation - reputation carries across social media |
Provides the ability to influence content without directly creating it |
How does SezWho drive more traffic to my site?
SezWho provides a unique contributor-centric content discovery mechanism to drive additional traffic to old content on a site. Please refer to the about us page for more details.
I have a site that does not get many comments. Is SezWho applicable to me?
Yes!!!! SezWho allows sites to leverage their contributors to drive traffic. Because of SezWho's unique contributor-centric content discovery mechanism, the sites that don't have many comments can still benefit from SezWho by providing incentives for participation and by driving traffic from other sites based on common contributors.
Why should I sign up for a SezWho account?
If you are a site owner you need to sign up for an account to obtain an access key to activate the Sezwho plug-in. Once you activate the SezWho plug-in, you can track various statistics about user interactions on your site by logging in to your SezWho account.
If you are a contributor or rater, you can signup for an account to view your contributions and ratings on various sites, to manage your public profile, to see statistics about your contributions and to verify your comments or ratings.
Star Power
The SezWho "Star Power" score is a long term rating for a persona that indicates the overall community reputation within a given context. All the persona's contributions and community ratings are considered when calculating the "Star Power" score. A new content item, created by a persona is assigned the persona's "Star Power" as the initial score. After the initial score, the community can rate the content item, which will change its score.
How is the SezWho "Star Power" score calculated?
- Existing "Star Power" score of the contributor in a given context
- Existing "Star Power" score of the rater of a contribution in a given context
- Frequency of participation of the contributor in a given context
- Consistency of the participation of the contributor
- Time of interaction
- Topic under discussion
What is the best way for me to increase my SezWho "Star Power" score?
The best way to build and keep a high "Star Power" score is to consistently make quality contributions, rate other users contributions and generally be a good and active member of a community.
Do SezWho scores carry across sites?
Yes, SezWho is a distributed system. User interactions and reputation from one social media site are carried over to other sites, without requiring users to rebuild their reputation. So a user with a good reputation on one site would have their a higher initial content item score on all other sites. This provides incentives for users to maintain high "Star Power" score.
Identity and Privacy
How does SezWho identify users?
SezWho identifies users based on their email addresses. To protect the email address of users, these addresses are always kept private and not displayed on any site. Instead, we use a system generated name to uniquely identify users.
Identity authentication is the cornerstone of any good reputation system. SezWho supports Reputation Protection which enables users to lock down their profiles. When a profile is Reputation Protected, any new interaction will require explicit user authorization. The Comments and Ratings verification can be turned on from the my account page of the SezWho site. This feature allows users to fully control their interactions. 
Can I have multiple SezWho accounts based on different email addresses?
Yes, you can have multiple SezWho accounts based on different email addresses. However, we recommend having one account and adding all your email addresses to that account. This allows you to build your "Star Power" quickly across all your email addresses (irrespective of which one you choose to use on a particular site). If you want to have different personas across different communities (who amongst us doesn't have multiple personas??) , feel free to have separate accounts.
Why do I need to provide an email address when rating?
SezWho uses email addresses to identify users. So we ask users to provide an email address to ensure that each vote is valid and thereby maintain the integrity of the system. We also assign different rating to each of the rating depending on the "Star Power" score of rate. This makes it necessary for us to ask for rater's email.
We take your privacy very seriously and will never sell that information. Please refer to our privacy policy for more details. In addition, are working on enabling OpenID so that you don't have to provide email address.
I don't want to be recognized in the communities where I participate. Can I opt out of SezWho?
SezWho believes that by making our online personas public, all of us can dramatically improve the conversation in online communities. However we respect end-user's choice to not participate. SezWho enables such users to opt out.
Installation and Activation
What are the currently supported platforms?
Currently we support the Wordpress and Movable Type blogging platform. We are actively working on a plug-in for other platforms and will update you as we have more information.
What themes do you support for my site?
The SezWho plug-in is theme independent. For most themes, SezWho automatically add the UI elements needed. For some themes or if users want more control over the layout, users can manually add the UI elements to their theme templates. See installation instructions for your platform for more details.
Why do I need an access key for my site?
You need the access key to activate the SezWho plug-in for your blog. SezWho uses it to identify your blog and track various statistics that are available to you.
Can I use SezWho with other communities like forums, bulleting boards etc.?
That is our goal . currently we are starting with the blogs but we plan to address all social media types like forums, bulletin boards, Wikis, social book marking etc. over time.
How can I integrate SezWho with my platform?
We are working on a public API that will enable SezWho to be integrated into any social media platform. We will update the information when we release the API.
How can I configure my SezWho plug-in to change the look and feel?
SezWho plug-ins look and feel can be fully customized by writing CSS rules. We expose a number of custom CSS classes that can be defined to control all aspects of look and feel. Please refer to the detailed instructions for installation on your platform to learn more. We are working on a drag and drop editor which will make it easier for users to customize the look and feel without needed CSS skills. We will update here as soon as we have more details.