A Sustainable Train of Thought

Flickr.com has testimonials, but what strikes me is that there is no standardized format used in a testimonial, nor is there any way to see what relationship you have with the person whose given you a testimonial, nor is there any centralized system to indicate what a testimonial actually means. And I mean the last one in the sense of a witness more than anything else. There has to be a standardized or generally accepted valuation of a testimony for the testimony to actually have weight.

Sure, you can leave a testimonial simply as a way to say nice things about other people, which is fine. But for a testimonial to hold more weight, say to act as some kind of collateral or background check, then there needs to be some way of ensuring the testimony is accurate and that there’s a way to compare it against other testimonies. Comparison is important in terms of better-ness or relationships between people and so forth.

I also think that there has to be some substance to the testimony, either in terms of examples given, or in relationship to specific events. Otherwise, if a testimony is about how nice a person you are, but there are no examples, then there really isn’t much to back up such an assertion.

This might sound petty, but when you’re dealing with total strangers, you want to know certain things, such as the reliability of the record of your actions, who the people are who’ve testified for you, their relationship to you, and the nature of the transactions which they testified about. It’s very important for reasons of trust and security to ensure this information is accurate, concise, understandable, and standardized.