I've got 2 games in mind when talking about reputation. The first is TES4: Oblivion, where you have the fame and infamy statistics. Fame causes the initial disposition of normal people and good guys to be higher, while infamy raises your initial disposition by bad guys. I don't like this system, cause if you got a very high fame, people in an almost completly excluded little village are all friendly towards you, while you've never even seen them before and news of your deed spreading to this village seems very unlikly.

The other game is WoW, although it's completly uncomparable to Divine Divinity, the reputation system is pretty good for an MMORPG in my opinion. You got many different factions and many sell items that only become avaible once you got a high enough reputation with that particular faction.
The best exemple is the Scryers and the Aldor in Shatrath City, you've got 2 factions living side by side, you can't get in good standing by either faction cause if you do a quest for let's say the Aldor, your Scryers reputation drops by the same amount as your Aldor reputation increases. You have to chose to either side with the Aldor or the Scryers, and cause both of them hand out unique rewards it can be hard to chose a side. This has nothing do to with Good or Evil, it's just a clash between factions.

So let's say that in the main quest of the Next-Gen Game, there are 1 to 3 factions evovled. Doing main quests should have a huge impact on your reputation with those factions and then maybe a smaller reputation change towards the factions who live in the region where you did the quest(maybe even create this sort of wave effect like, the region where it happend gains an X change in reputation, regions around the original region an X/2 change and according to the scale of the act you did, further regions may aslo recieve a reputation change). Ofcours if it's something really important, every faction that is not completly excluded would hear of it and your reputation with them would change.
To keep all this trackable, maybe we could have a 'Reputation Page' or something similiar in our journal. And let's say that if you click on one of the Reputations, there pops up this little diagram with your reputation changes the last few days.

Twoheadeddragon: slowly getting used to it, I'm sure it'll be an awesome forum when Lynn and the other Larians have implented everything they want.

[Linked Image from miniprofile.xfire.com]