CNET: Twitter Search to dive deeper, rank results. Twitter Search will also get a “reputation” ranking system soon, Jayaram told me. When you do a search on a “trending” topic–a topic that is so big it gets its own link in the Twitter.com sidebar–Twitter will take into account the reputation of the person who wrote each tweet and rank the search results in part based on that.
This is important, even if it’s just a promise. Perhaps the key missing link in our ability to sort through the mass of information now cascading over us is how we combine popularity and reputation. The former is easy to measure, but the latter is a hugely complex task.
But when we figure this out — and it’ll take the combined brainpower of technologists and social scientists alike — the result will be one major step toward where we need to be going.
Take a look at http://tunkrank.com/, a pagerank analogue for twitter. Conceived and <a href=”http://thenoisychannel.com/2009/01/13/a-twitter-analog-to-pagerank/”>explained by Daniel Tunkelang</a> at his blog, The Noisy Channel, it should be resistant to gaming.