More on trust
Ohmygoshthisissoinsanelyimportant…
The Semantic Web Stack from Tim Berners-Lee:
What’s at the top of the stack?
Aaron Wall on Search Engine Land talks about credibility as a crucial element of SEO:
Authority is not something you take, but something that is granted. Gaining authority makes it easier to gain more authority, and eventually it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.
And then ruins it by saying:
In many instances appearing as though you are credible is more important than actually knowing what you are talking about, especially on a network that has no respect for copyright and where just about everything is freely available.
A whole industry is sprouting up to maintain people’s online image (so that their clients and constituents can continue to trust them).
Francis Fukuyama thinks it’s pretty important, if you go by his book ‘Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity‘. From the Library Journal’s review:
He argues that the most pervasive cultural characteristic influencing a nation’s prosperity and ability to compete is the level of trust or cooperative behavior based upon shared norms. In comparison with low-trust societies (China, France, Italy, Korea), which need to negotiate and often litigate rules and regulations, high-trust societies like those in Germany and Japan are able to develop innovative organizations and hold down the cost of doing business. Fukuyama argues that the United States, like Japan and Germany, has been a high-trust society historically but that this status has eroded in recent years.
Just so you don’t mistrust my words, you should know that I haven’t read that book; I found it via a piece Jakob Nielsen wrote waaaayyyyy back in 1999 (the web equivalent of the Pleistocene) on trustworthiness in web design. It does look like a good read, though.
‘Don’t be evil’ is a fantastic motto—as long as we trust them.
What are your thoughts on trust? How does your level of trust differ online from offline, if at all? Should trust, not relevance, be the holy grail for websites?
