xClaims in beta blogs and forums

You've heard Korby talk a lot about xClaims and how they help not only authors like myself determine the lenses through which people evaluate my content contributions, but also how xClaims help readers like you determine the credibility of folks like me.

Well, enough talk.  Let's start putting all of this into action.  With this latest refresh of Microsoft beta communities are tied in with blogs and forums.  What do you do with them?

Make a claim
Vote on a claim
Evaluate someone's credibility
See your claims
See the claims of others

Making a claim

If you had a chance to create a new thread or a response, you may have noticed this little section below the post editor that says something about adding a new claim or an existing claim.  It's really as simple as that.  In the space provided, you can enter in a claim such as "this is technically accurate" and it will appear along with your message.

Voting on a claim
Why add a claim?  Basically to have people vote on it.  Beyond that, you are able to essentially get lots of people to agree (or disagree) with what you have to say.  Why might you wish to open yourself up for that?  Well, whether or not you apply this to every post you make is up to you but for certain topics, it may be beneficial for you to gain credibility in topics that matter to you.  What do I mean by this?  Well, let's say I'm an avid forums user, posting on any number of topics from XNA to SQL.  While I may know my stuff in XNA (an example really -- lol) I only know basic queries in SQL.  As such, I would want a tailored claim saying "I know my XNA" and people can then vote on it.  For SQL, I would not apply a comparable claim, because I would not want to be known for my skills (or lack thereof) in that topic.

Evaluating someone's credibility
This is done through voting, seeing the votes of others, and seeing all of the claims of another person.  We have some of this now, and more on the way.  Specifically, after voting (and commenting if you want) you are able to see the vote tallies of other people.  This becomes of value when you compare the content of multiple people that "seem" to be correct.  Through a closer look at how others agreed (or not) with that claim, you can better determine how credible that person is with regards to that topic. 

Credibility also comes into play when you look at all of the claims of other people.  While right now this is limited to a person explicitly making it visible (such as my claims here), we will have the ability to easily discover the claims that others made visible to others.

See your claims
We touched upon this briefly.  Basically, if you can see it, others can too.  To see your claims, click on your display name (in the upper right corner of your screen) and you will be directed to the profile page.  At the bottom of the page, there is a link that says, "View Claims."  Clicking on this link will result in your claims being exposed.  You can see how folks voted, in addition to any comments they may have left for you.  If you share this link out with others, they can then see your claims and can then get a better sense of who you are, what you know, and the like….

See the claims of others
As discussed, this is still a work in progress.  The only way to see the claims of others (in total) is if they exposed that link to you by clicking on their profile, viewing their claims, and sharing that link.  We will work to make this easier in future versions of our beta communities.

So that in a nutshell is what you can do today with xClaims in blogs and forums.  I hope you now understand how xClaims are incredible tools for you to gain recognition on your terms while also determining the credibility of online resources.

(xposted)