Last week the OJB published a roundup piece on how games were being used in journalism. The discussion around the post at Slashdot concerning journalism in general is so good it’s worth highlighting in its own right. I would republish the best ones here, but that would be a disservice to the range of discussion taking place. Take a look here* 

*if you’re not familiar with Slashdot, comments get rated so you’ll only see the most ‘interesting’ ones expanded at first – another lesson for news organisations. 

Yahoo! have released a family of Reputation patterns:

“They don’t tell you how to lay out a page or where to put an interactive widget. Instead, they address how to design a reputation system for your social software.”

Why is this important? The patterns are a wonderful resource for any news organisation looking to plan a community element in which reputation performs a role. In my experience, reputation systems are pretty important in encouraging users to keep coming back to your online community – you could argue, for instance, that the number of friends in Facebook or followers in Twitter is one simple example. Plurk more explicitly uses ‘karma’, as does (in a much better way) Slashdot (for more on Slashdot and karma systems I thoroughly recommend Gatewatching by Axel Bruns).

Yahoo say these are “the first of several collections of social-design related patterns that we’re working on,” so worth keeping an eye on what comes next.