Trust is a fickle beast. It implicitly or explicitly governs so much of our behavior, yet is prohibitively difficult or impossible to accurately quantify. Trust of friends graces the more personal end of the spectrum, while trust of companies and sources of information the other, though these are getting more and more bundled up with one another.
Brick and mortar institutions, just as websites, often build their reputation as trustworthy entities with which to do business. Word of mouth is no doubt the most significant contributor to this, but ratings organizations such as Consumer Reports play their role. The web obviously simplifies this process by making it mass scale and simplifying it, which has it benefits and drawbacks. Social news and ratings sites allow the aggregate “recommendations” of thousands or millions of often like minded individuals. These are only becoming more advanced and automated, as sites like last.fm or iLike improve their services.
A lot has been written about this kind of trust building online; that is, the trust in a large group. Can we trust Wikipedia is a well-examined and interesting question, but I’d rather focus on individual trust on the Internet.
In general, bloggers build trust by writing accurate and interesting posts over a longer period of time. If their predictions come true or their word-view seems “correct” or at least amenable to the reader, a bond of virtual trust is formed even though the medium is decidedly one-to-many.
I’ve been seeing a lot of Disclosure Statements popping up on blogs lately, and I think this is a trend in the right direction. Lessig posted a well thought out one on his blog, and even amended it based on readers’ comments, demonstrating that he trusts his readers to have good insight. He lists non-profit boards he sits on, states that he does not take products for review or accept money to reccomend something, etc. The best part, I think, is his Non-Corruption Principle:
The simple version is just this: I don’t shill for anyone.
The more precise version is this: I never promote as policy a position that I have been paid to advise about, consult upon, or write about. If payment is made to an institution that might reasonably be said to benefit me indirectly, then I will either follow the same rule, or disclose the payment.
More should come out and promise things like this in an age when blogging is becoming more commercial and the line is increasingly blurry between news, opinion, and pure marketing.
Other names of bloggers with solid ethics that spring to mind are Scoble and Arrington, both of whom have posted in the past about from whom they have accepted what and how they decide what to post. Their sites hold tremendous advertising potential for the companies they mention or recommend, so clearly we would not want to find out that they were being paid to post. Arrington’s “Policy on Embargoes and Exclusive Stories” is posted here.
I’m not saying that bloggers should not be able to be businessmen who own stock. We have a lot to learn from these entrepreneurs and insiders. They should just disclose what they do and what they have to gain. And a lot of the time they do. Thomas Hawk precedes every post about Zooomr (of which he is CEO) and Flickr or other photosharing sites (direct competitors) with a disclosure that he is CEO of Zooomr. I can read his posts with this in mind and read between the lines as I like.
The problem comes when people don’t disclose. How do we find out or read between the lines then? The simple answer is we can’t. But I feel like the web is connected enough that these posters will be called out on other blogs or forums. Thus the impersonal aggregate trust building system interacts with the personal end of the spectrum in a system of checks and balances. Individuals can similarly call out Digg’s social rating system if they so choose.
The web is certainly still not a perfectly trustworthy place and fraud is still a problem, but websites like Ebay have shown that ratings systems can alleviate these problems. So too can personal disclosures or policy statements. States exerting real world laws within virtual marketplaces increase trust as well. Building trust is difficult in the real and virtual worlds alike, but those who want to make an impact in the latter would do well to figure out how they can strengthen this variable in such a way as to build loyalty and respect.
Posted by Alex Rosen 
