Spock announced yesterday the release of Spock Power, an algorithm that rewards Spock users and prevents spam. Spock Power determines how much influence you have on Spock each time you vote or add a tag, image, link, or relationship. The more power you have, the greater your ability to influence the results on Spock.

Naturally, I could not resist giving it a go. The first thing I did was to Log in, and then search for “Charles S Knight” and I came up in the first spot. Every Spock user begins with a Spock Power of 1. As you add and vote on information on Spock, your Spock Power will increase. Their algorithm calculates your Spock Power, in part, from the information you add and how other Spock users vote on that information.

Since I was looking at my own profile, it was easy to do things like add a picture and a few tags. Each time I did an action, my Spock Power number went up.

If the information I added was not accurate, or is frequently voted down by other Spock users, my Spock Power would decrease. If my Spock Power decreases to 0, all of my prior votes on Spock would be removed and I would not be able to add any more information to Spock until I started voting more accurately and correctly. So, some of the votes that I might cast if my Spock Power were to, heaven forbid, drop to 0 would not show up in the search results, but they might convince Spock that I have learned the error of my ways!

So, how do I increase my Spock Power?

1. Add factual and relevant information about other people on Spock
2. Create a factual and complete search result of myself, including tags, pictures, relationships, and links.
3. Vote accurately on information on Spock
4. Flag items that I find that are not consistent with the Spirit of Spock

How does my Spock Power affect tags?

Tags and other information are shown if they have a positive score. Tags are removed if their score is negative. This means that if I were to vote down a tag that a user with a higher Spock Power added, it may not be removed. However, thank goodness, I do have more power over my own search result on Spock.

They also have a Leader-board that shows the users on Spock with the highest Spock Power, and it is updated nightly. That sounds like more of a novelty, but I’m sure that some people will go nuts trying to get the highest Spock Power score, and that’s just more fuel for the fire for Spock.

Here is my Spock profile as it looked with a Spock Power score of 11:

This entry was posted on Friday, September 7th, 2007 at 1:29 pm and is filed under News, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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