Why Trustmojo?
We’ve had some questions about the name “Trustmojo” so I thought the Oxford American Dictionaries might help shed some light on our choice.
Trust “firm belief in the reliability, truth, ability or strength of someone or something /…/ acceptance of the truth of a statement without evidence or investigation”
Mojo “a magic charm, talisman, or spell”
“I’ve got my mojo working but it just don’t work on you” / Muddy Waters, 1960 Even though I have objections to the definition of trust (especially “firm belief” as I think it trust can be loose) I think the definition of mojo works well. Trust is intangible, fuzzy, often implicit and generally hard to grasp or explicate adding an almost magic-like quality to it. Thus Trustmojo is about the “magic” of trust and in a sense, an attempt to demystify the aura surrounding it.
i immediatly loved the name and concept, and the mojo part in it. trust is in fact one of the few issues that really changed a lot in the use of the medium *and* are also potentially dangerous to your privacy. also noone could really explain to me *why* its happening. i mean, check out the attention stuff going on http://attentiontrust.org/ .
Kosmar,
glad you like the idea! We were at an attentiontrust meetup two weeks ago, I listened to a talk by Seth Goldstein yesterday and I think I still don’t “get it”. Recording your attention seems interesting at first (although hardly anything new), but I feel there are no clear prospects laid out by the creators on what we could really do with it. Anyway, it’s an interesting experiment. In the meantime I’m recording my attentionstream here (like a good early adopter should) and hope that something will come of it!
Seems like many people these days think that by just providing an open api to to some data repository, good things will happen automagically. Same goes for attentiontrust at this point. To me, mashups seem to do even worse than IT-startups generally (I have the feeling 90%+ do little good, but that’s just my feeling)…
…And we still have to have figure out just how this initiative relates to our own research project…!