As I sat in Sydney airport this morning, plugging my PDA into the wall and my MP3 player into my notebook (which then got plugged into the wall as well), it struck me what a massive overload of gadgets and wires accompany me on my journeys. Have a look:

Is this ridiculous or what? From top left, row by row:

• PDA
• Cable to link MP3 to computer
• Charger for US cell phone
• Charger for PDA
• Flash drive
• Small headphones
• Adapter for NZ Charger for PDA
• MP3 player
• US cell phone
• Audio recorder
• Big headphones
• Charger for laptop (US wire not shown)
• Laptop

Am I out of control, or merely an amateur? What kind of gadgets do you travel with?

The other day, I got accused of being a Trotskyist. If you’re not sure what that means, don’t feel bad; I had absolutely no idea myself.

The woman who used the T-word on me furnished this explanation: evidently, Trotsky claimed that the general populace doesn’t understand the levers that interconnect society and the economy.

I had just pointed out that a large portion of the people who want to stop global warming don’t realize how much their day-to-day lives would have to change. Don’t get me wrong—I want to stop global warming too. But I still drive a car, and go on overseas trips, and buy imported products, and I fully appreciate that all of those things are intricately linked to our fuel consumption.

Right now I’m about 80% through reading Wikinomics, a study of mass collaboration. The book is driving home for me how absolutely massive the uphill battle is for companies looking to unseat Google, or Amazon, or any other organization that has understood and leveraged the collaborative model.

In my most recent piece for Search Insider, I wrote about the powerful force of habit that keeps me using Google for search, and touched on the fact that a tweak in features is nowhere near enough to make me change search engines.

Essentially, I don’t have a lot of pain when it comes to search, and minor features improvements just aren’t enough to motivate me to switch.

The Trotskyism issue, though, is much bigger. Google is not just Google. Google is every other company, website, blog and mashup that has built a business model on the back of the search giant. All of these entities have a vested interest in Big G’s continued success.

Companies that have Google as competition can’t win just by being better at search; they would also have to convince an entire population of individually crafted satellite businesses to switch to a new model.

The Internet is an ecosystem. Companies looking to succeed in this space have to understand more than just the competition; they have to understand how all of the organizations surrounding them interrelate and interdepend.

Do you see other examples of web-based ecosystems around you? What are they? What do they mean for companies and competition? And what do you think of businesses built around this sort of model?

Summary: Database giant Acxiom has just confirmed VortexDNA’s value proposition by including attitudes and beliefs in their relevance technology. The predictive value of who you are and what you believe is significantly greater than that of context.

Those of you who follow this blog regularly know that the foundation of VortexDNA’s relevance technology is that an individual’s purpose and values can be used to predict relevance.

Going by a piece by Laurie Petersen at Online Media Daily today, we’re not the only ones who know this to be true:

DATABASE MARKETING GIANT ACXIOM TODAY officially launches its Relevance-X products designed to allow marketers to make online media buys…

“We’re really excited about this,” said Rich Howe, Acxiom’s chief marketing and strategy officer. “We’re bringing our knowledge and experience in direct marketing to the online channels to give clicks context–going far beyond basic information such as age, gender and household income to include the attitudes, beliefs and lifestyles of consumers that are much more predictive.” [emphasis mine]

According to the article, Acxiom has been seeing click-through rates double or triple in tests of the Relevance-X system: powerful numbers.

Even without the boost from tapping into consumer attitudes, behavioral targeting is far more effective than contextual targeting. Consider what this Research Brief from the Center for Media Research has to say:

…a study on consumer receptivity to online advertising… found that more online consumers are consistently more receptive to behaviorally targeted ads than to contextual advertising, outperforming contextual by as much as 22 percent in some categories.

Marla R. Schimke, vice president of marketing at Revenue Science, said “… (this report shows that) behavioral targeting is more effective than contextual advertising for advertisers, publishers, and for consumers… This study… reaffirms our belief that Internet users favor advertising relevant to them personally…” [emphasis mine]

When that brief says, “relevant to them personally,” they’re saying we know you like computers so we’ll show you ads about computers. The validation of VortexDNA’s technology has shown that it’s possible to go far, far deeper than that: link relevance can be accurately predicted based on who you are, what your purpose in life is, and what you value above all.

And VortexDNA technology can do this without ever tracking history.

This concept is not standalone, either; companies can use it to augment their current recommendation technology rather than replace it.

Imagine the power of a search engine that integrates VortexDNA technology with existing keyword relevance matching. Imagine how gratifying it would be for an ecommerce site improve their recommendations to you based on what you really care about.

Do you have an ecommerce site? A search engine? An ad platform? Do you just find this topic intriguing? Leave a comment below or email me privately (kaila @ vortexdna.com). Let’s begin a conversation.

This is a dramatic shift in how we look at relevance, and we’d love for you to participate with us.

Summary: In this post, I review some of the ways that trust is earned online, including voting, feedback, human editors and inbound links. Why don’t we have mechanisms like these to measure the trustworthiness of companies?

Bruno Giussani published some notes recently from a conference in Amsterdam, including this comment from Wall Street Journal tech columnist Walt Mossberg:

There is a digital tidal wave that changes every walk of life, every business, every part of the society. The question of this session is: how can we tell who has authority in today’s world?

So far 100% of the people who’ve voted in yesterday’s poll prioritize trust over privacy.

Trust is critical. Authority is critical. But why do we need to trust companies? Here are a few thoughts:

• We have to trust that the companies we give our information to won’t ever make a mistake and accidentally release it to the public, such as my recent experience when Lingo gave me the email addresses of 14,000 customers.
• We have to trust that the companies we give our information to are not conducting activities in such a way as to expose them to subpoenas.
• We have to trust that the digital security mechanisms they have in place are sufficient to prevent malicious access.
• We have to trust that the company itself doesn’t have any malicious or undesired intent.

Those are pretty heavy burdens of proof for online companies, and most are highly difficult to prove—I mean, seriously, how many consumers have the faintest idea of the digital security mechanisms that Facebook does or doesn’t have in place?

The actual process is similar to voting for president. You can’t know in advance every issue that might come up during a presidency, so you decide if you trust the person as a whole based on your individual impressions. The hope is that you can count on someone to do the right thing even if you have no idea of the future circumstances that person will face.

Wouldn’t it be nice, though, if there were some way of measuring trust in companies? It shouldn’t be too hard.

Right now, we’ve got some decent, explicit methods for indicating the trustworthiness of sources:

• Votes: Sites like Digg and StumbleUpon use a voting system to try to get the cream to rise to the top.
• Feedback: eBay and their Kiwi counterpart TradeMe use a feedback rating system to increase buyer confidence.
• Human editors: Slashdot relies on a human-powered filtering process to ensure only good stories make it to the site.
• Inbound links: The lifeblood of Google and the bane of any new site-owner’s existence. Technorati also relies on these for its rankings.

Even though we all know that they can be gamed, these methods are still useful as an indicator of website or page quality. But there’s no such thing for companies, really; no standardized, democratized eBay-type rating system that allows users to share their experiences with each other.

Do you think such a thing would be useful to have? And what would be the best way to implement it—how should it work so that it doesn’t get gamed, either by consumers or by the company itself?

Over at Search for Better Search, the topic of conversation is “Winning Users’ Trust”. They’ve got an all-star list of heavy hitters weighing in: John Battelle, Om Malik, Michael Arrington, etc. I was struck by the fact that, for the majority of the commentators, trust was a much bigger issue than data. It didn’t seem to matter what information search engines stored, as long as they were transparent and gave users control:

John Battelle: The way they can do this is by giving their users access to, and editing permissions over, the data they keep.

Gary Price: Transparency is key… For search engines to sustain user trust, they must be transparent about the filtering they use to display results, capture information and disclose biases.

Michael Arrington: User trust is built by giving users control…

Richard MacManus: I think the number one best practice is to engage the community and have conversations with them… Once that starts to happen, people begin to trust corporations more.

Dr Riza Berkan: Search engines must openly declare what they are doing with the data and all tracking devices, almost like a confession.

Ars Technica: The compliment (sic) of power must always be control; a search engine that learns from you must also trust you by you giving you the tools to curate and prune your search history and to opt-out at will.

Matt Marshall: Somehow you’ve got to protect identities, and if you’re collecting information about us, you should let us know what you’re collecting, and where to find it.

Only one person, Om Malik, had anything at all to say about whether corporations should be storing data at all:

Search engines have to make it clear that they don’t store any data whatsoever. The only way they can do that is if search is their only business. Email, personalized home pages, mobile clients, IM clients, search history - they are the enemies of private searching.

I don’t know about you, but I found this really interesting. There’s a big difference between people not wanting their information shared at all and being able to control when and with whom it gets shared. If search engines follow Om’s worldview, then trust is a non-issue (presuming you believe that they’re not out-and-out lying about not storing data). If you don’t have any of my data, it doesn’t matter whether or not I trust you to protect it from subpoenas or hackers—you can’t give them what you don’t have.

If search engines listen to everyone else, on the other hand, one of the single most critical factors for web businesses over the next few years will be the ability to engender trust.

These two concepts are vastly different in practice. If trust is more important than privacy, then a company that says up front, “We collect all of your search history and use it to target you directly,” will do better than a company that says, “We will not use your search history for anything other than making our algorithm better, and oh by the way those ads today that match your search query from two weeks ago? Pure coincidence.”

In other words, it’s not what they do. It’s whether they keep their word.

Which is more important to you? Trust or privacy? Cast your vote to find out what other people think!

Last night I got to put faces to a bunch of names I had only read about, as well as some that hadn’t yet arrived on my radar: David Berkowitz, of course; Melek Pulatkonak, Riza Berkan and Amitava Mitra from Hakia; Evan ? from the New York Times; and a few others. Everyone I met was hugely welcoming, which has been my experience of New Yorkers my entire life.

I love to do stuff like this, because it makes my work that much more tangible. It also gives me an opportunity to gain a greater understanding of how people interact with the blog: what’s working and what’s not working. For example, the first thing Amitava said to me was, “I love your blog, but…”

He trailed off at this point and turned a bit red, but I urged him to continue.

“I read 40 blogs a day. Sometimes your pieces are too long.”

“Fair enough,” I replied, “but sometimes I have a lot to say. How about an executive summary at the top with a link to the full piece?”

“Excellent,” he grinned.

I’ve been thinking about you (YOU, the one reading this blog—no, don’t look over your shoulder!) and wishing I knew more about you. Who are you? What kind of work do you do? What do you get out of this blog? Are you like Amitava, wishing I would tweak something to make the conversational experience more enjoyable or useful for you?

Maybe we should do one of those group exercises. We’ll go around the room; please state your name and tell us a few words about yourself.

I’ll start: My name is Kaila Colbin. I’m a born-and-bred New Yorker, but I’ve found my way to that paradise known as New Zealand and that’s where I make my abode. I’m a blogger with VortexDNA, an information designer, and an avid reader, with a higher than average level of optimism and enthusiasm. I’m also overwhelmingly enthralled with people, technology, and the way the world works.

Come on, now; it’s your turn. Don’t be shy!