Frictionless reputation?

On Monday I referenced "Frictionless Reputation". I thought it worth touching on it in more detail here. The reduction of friction helps fuel the growh of community. AOL's introduction of OpenID support has been a great step forward in enabling new services to simplify registration processes and reduce friction involved in signing up for a service. Given that OpenID is related to screen names I have a question to pose to you, our development community. Bear with me and follow this stream of thought:

• OpenID provides a structure to allow data owners to release information to OpenID compliant sites.
• One of my interests has been around persona, identity and reputation. I have already talked about reputation and the potential for the expansion of AIM's influence given the ability to represent reputation based on use of a screen name.
• One of the initiatives that is gaining traction at the same time as OpenID are Microformats.
• AIM screen names represent a significant portion of the potential OpenID pool.

Given this background could AOL gain some leverage and influence in the market place if it were to sponsor a Reputation microformat? This could be an option that screen name owners could release to other sites via OpenID.

I am no expert on Microformats so I welcome contributions to the discussion from any readers. What are the positive and negative ramifications of such a move? Experts on the subject please enlighten us!

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