Reputation management and centralized forum repositories

Having been on several peripheral jeep forums I think to myself that it shouldnt be neccessary to have to visit so many sites to get all your forum action together. Also, it comes to mind that many of the popular forums, including Pirate 4x4 have had scalability issues in the past, especially when it comes to their search features.

From a redundancy standpoint it makes sense to have your forums spaced out, so you dont have a catastrophic loss of data take out all total forum content, but companies like Google, and Wal-Mart have shown us that proper management of data is possible, even on a rediculously massive scale. Why then couldnt we have a centralized forum data storage system and make sites like Pirate 4x4 and NAXJA filtered portals onto that data.

Most forums now follow the folder mentality that we've struggled with through the majority of our computing history. With the emergance of Web 2.0 style features in Flickr, Gmail, and others we have the opportunity to apply tags to data that allow it to belong to multiple categories.

For example, if you wanted to create a forum site that dealt with 1988-2003 jeep cherokee's you could create a filter on a centralized forum system that displays tagged data with this tag list (1988:2003, jeep, cherokee, suv), and then you are good to go. Data items could have universally unique identifiers, so that you could track relations between data, including responses and threading. Obviously you would have issues with spam if you just used it straight up like this, since any yokel could tag data as jeep and cherokee, but if you combined this with a reputation management system that linked in data about how much you trust individuals, the cream of the crop would rise to the top.

Google is in such a perfect position to do something like this. There are a lot of high dollar transactions going back and forth in these forums, as offroading in general can be a very expensive hobbby. Why not capitalize on this and offer google adwords like advertising to portal sites that customizes views on the global forum namespace.