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We have released an update for the add-on, which adds new features you have requested and fixes some problems. Thank you for all the feedback!

Here are the notable changes compared to WOT 20070226:

• New feature: adds confidence indicators to the embedded link information popup:

  

• New feature: due to popular request, adds an option highlight link backgrounds.

• Bug fix: fixes the testimony window for certain themes with lighter font colors.

• Bug fix: fixes a handful of other minor problems.

Version 20070329 is now available for download from our website.

(Visit Mozilla Add-ons for previous versions and a more detailed version history of the WOT add-on.)

WOT has won the "Best B2C service" category in Grand One 2007, the biggest and most important digital media competition in Finland. The winners were announced yesterday evening in the 11th annual Grand One gala in Helsinki.

There were a total of 215 submissions to this years Grand One competition, 44 of them in the consumer service category. Among the finalists in WOT's category were, for example, entries from Sulake Corporation, Bayer, and Elisa.

Against Intuition, Inc. is honored by this recognition and we would like to thank the panel of judges for acknowledging our efforts. Of course, a large share of the credit goes to Design Agency Fusion Ltd., who is responsible for the designing the visual appearance for our service. Thanks guys!

In this post I will recap answers to some of the questions that keep coming up every now and then, and which many of you have probably thought about at some point. All of these answers have already appeared in our blog or in the help section.

Reliability

The first question that pops into people's mind when they hear about WOT is that if it's anonymous, how reliable can the reputations be? Well, WOT is not your father's rating system, where each anonymous user has an equal say in reputations. Instead, it's more like a meritocracy where pseudonymous users earn trust by showing rational behaviour when testifying. If you are a new user or your behaviour is erratic, the system won't trust you.

So how can you tell if the reputation you see on the add-on is reliable? You look at the confidence indicator. The more vertical bars you see in the testimony window, the more the reputation can be trusted. If you see none, our system has very low confidence in the correctness of the reputation.

Abuse

But isn't this susceptible to manipulation, what happens if I recruit all my friends to give bad testimonies to a website? The concepts above make it a lot more difficult to manipulate reputations. Of course, our system doesn't solely rely on them to protect itself from attacks, it is also able to automatically detect and stop manipulation attempts.

However, despite these measures, we don't believe any system will ever be perfect at stopping all kinds of manipulation. If our system doesn't have any reliable data for a website, it is still possible for a single user to have a large influence on the reputation. If this happens, the confidence in the reputation will be low, so you will be able to notice this.

If you come across a website whose reputation you believe is wrong, the first thing to do is testify. It's just a couple of clicks away. If you believe the reputation is being manipulated, we encourage you to report it using our feedback form or via email. If you are a website owner, please remember that we don't set the reputations, we merely provide our users the means for sharing their opinions. However, all abuse reports will be investigated.

Annoyances

I receive a warning when I visit a website I know to be trustworthy, what can I do about it? Warnings are shown only if the website has a bad reputation in one or more categories and the confidence in the reputation is high enough. However, if you disagree with the warning, you can make it go away simply by testifying. Just open the testimony window and see which reputations are wrong.

If you find some of the add-on features to be annoying, you can easily disable them in WOT preferences. Either right click the indicator icon and select "Preferences..." or use the Tools / WOT menu. For example, if you feel the warnings are too invasive, you can configure how they are shown or disable them entirely for any category. Other features can be configured the same way.

A quick tip many users haven't noticed: if at some point you would like the add-on to stop bothering you right now, just right click a indicator icon and deselect the "Enabled" option to immediately disable the entire add-on.

Privacy

How about my privacy, do you track where I browse? No, we don't track you. We have perhaps the strictest privacy policy in the industry, and we follow it to the letter. We don't receive or store any information that our system absolutely doesn't need for computing reputations or preventing abuse.

For example, the add-on never sends the URLs you visit to our servers, it only sends us the hostname for the site. That is all we need for looking up the reputation. The hostname is strongly encrypted in transit to make sure nobody can eavesdrop on you. Even your request hits our server logs encrypted. Furthermore, the add-on caches any reputations it receives. This means that reputations are requested only when you first enter a website, not on every subsequent visit to a different page.

And most importantly, we don't permanently store any information on where you visit or what you search. Everything is deleted after a month, except for your testimonies, of course. In comparison, Google recently announced that it will start "anonymizing" logs after 18-24 months, and made no promises on ever deleting anything.

Anything else?

If we missed a question you have always wanted answered, don't hesitate to drop us a note. You may also want to check out the earlier posts to our blog for further information.

Just a quick note. If you are a registered user of the WOT add-on, you can now browse your testimonies on the My WOT page.

As always, if you notice a testimony that you no longer feel is correct, you can simply visit the website and change your testimony.

(Also, if you are interested in Ajax development, please check out mootools, the coolest JavaScript framework on the web. =)

Why is it that when you create a blog on one of the popular hosting sites, it already has a reputation even when it's brand new? And why are the reputations clearly bad in some categories? It's because the neighbourhood where you host your new blog also affects its reputation.

Earlier, I discussed how reputations traverse the domain hierarchy. This is exactly what happens here. Your blogging service hosts a huge number of blogs under the same domain, all of which might not be exactly trustworthy. In fact, many of them could be just spam. In our system, the reputations of these thousands of neighbouring blogs affect the reputation of the parent domain your hosting service reserves for its users. And when you create a new blog under one of these domains, it initially inherits the parent's reputation.

In the figure above (see larger) you can see a snapshot of the reputations for some of the popular blog hosting domains. These reputations can be seen as an indication on how the average reader initially views a previously unknown blog. Without any past knowledge of contents or quality, the reader will derive her expectations from earlier experiences with nearby blogs. Obviously, the more popular a hosting service becomes, the more questionable content tends to end up there.

This behaviour in WOT was modelled after the real life. In the physical world you are constantly reminded of your surroundings. It's likely that you'll trust a business located in a good neighbourhood far more than a one in the shady part of town.

Therefore, until we have enough distinct information about your blog, the reputations of all the other blogs under the same domain will continue to contribute to your reputation. Only once we have enough reliable testimonies, we can ignore your neighbourhood. Of course, the best way to avoid this initial prejudice is to register your own domain and host your blog there.