Whether your reputations are public, personal (displayed to users) or corporate (hidden from users) on a per-entity basis, you'll get much more leverage from using the reputation to enhance the presentation of your site. These patterns illustrate some of the ways to filter, rank, sort, and make other valuable decisions about your entities and users based on reputation information.

There's too much information out there - whether it be a huge list of products or services or websites or movies or songs or user created content such as blog entries or videos. Reputation can help you sift through it all. These patterns perform two basic functions: emphasize entities with higher, positive, reputation and deemphasize or hide entities with lower, negative, reputation.

Remember, reputation isn't a guarantee that all content on your site is phenomenal. Sometimes it's enough to just hide the lesser stuff. Unfortunately, sometimes the bad can be very bad. You may have to intervene, and moderate content. Reputation will help you do that.

Personal reputations can be used very effectively as a type of running internal dialog between a site and its users: show personal reputations to users to let them know “how they're doing” with respect to certain facets of their engagement with the community.

A very obvious use for reputation information is to display it in association with your community members' identity information. This provides not just an image of the stated interests and activities of a person, but an actual record of their participation on the site.