Trust metric
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In psychology and sociology, a trust metric is a measure of how a member of a group is trusted by the other members. The concept has received much interest recently due to their importance in making many kinds of virtual communities, such as Friendster and LiveJournal, effective. Attack resistance is an important property of trust metrics which reflects their ability to handle agents who participate in bad faith (i.e. who aim to subvert the goals of the trust metric).
The first forms of trust metrics in computer software were in applications like EBay's Feedback Rating. Slashdot introduced its notion of karma, earned for activities perceived to promote group effectiveness, that has been very influential in later virtual communities.
The free software developer resource Advogato is based on a novel approach to attack resistant trust metrics of Raph Levien. Levien observed that Google's PageRank algorithm can be understood to be an attack resistant trust metric rather similar to that behind Advogato.
Trust Metrics Wiki (http://moloko.itc.it/trustmetricswiki/moin.cgi) is a Wiki whose goal is to review, understand, code and compare on same data all the trust metrics proposed so far.