A walk in Marin County with Howard Rheingold and his dog resulted in an invitation to present Trustmojo at a FutureCommons meeting at Institute For The Future. One of the topics we discussed during- and after our talk was the role of tags in trustbuilding. In the talk I showed how I discovered researchers on del.icio.us and judged them by their tagclouds.

As we develop a literacy for tagclouds, they let us peek inside a person’s mind. We get more out of these clouds than just an idea of a person’s reading- and classifying habits. Tagclouds are inspiring. They contain hints. Those hints get our minds going.

My del.icio.us feed is just one facet of my online identity. Tags then, could be though of as facets of this facet. On one interpretation, the most common tags in my cloud show what community I belong to, whereas the tail of niche tags convey my distinct identity. Fred Stutzman (Founder of ClaimID) seems to have browsed a lot of tagclouds recently. He argues that “[people's] tagclouds shows [him] more about them than [he] ever gets from a homepage, blog or social network profile”. He also talks about “reading” del.icio.us tagclouds:

At the top will be [a person's] “internet identity”, more or less. You might see a ton of clustered links to programming websites, or business/marketing blog posts, and so on. As you scale down the tagcloud, and you get into the tags that are used 1 or 2 or 3 times, you start to notice different things. You may see links to a sports team in which the person participates, or a small cluster of links to a hobby or a charity. You might see travel information, or a link to a church or family member’s webpage. As the explorer, you have to explicate what is what, but I’ve found it becomes quite easy to do this as you do it over and over.

Just before our talk, Marc Dangeard, who was attending the meeting, happened to give me his business card. Incidentally, he had his del.icio.us tagcloud printed on the back of the card.

Perhaps the most important reason to give someone your business card is to convey trustworthiness. Trust research show that openness has a strong connection to trustworthiness. Tagclouds let us take a peek inside someone’s mind. Seen in this light, putting your tagcloud on your business card makes perfect sense.

After an invitation from Chris Plasser and Caterina we headed out to Yahoo! Innovation yesterday to give a talk about trust and our ongoing research. We based the presentation and accompanying slides around four different stories that all relate to trust in various ways. The first one, about eBay ratings and reputation sheds light on the rating bias and also the re-remapping of reputation that takes place. The multi-dimensional phenomena of reputation travels via a biased one-dimensional scale to becoming a social cue rather than an objective numerical value and is thus in a sense “taken back to humanness“ of a new multi-dimensional phenomena.

The second story, about post-ratings within intimate google groups and the conflict of large scale systems and informal interactions brings up Tönnies concept of Gesellschaft and Gemeinschaft. These two sociological “normal types” serve as an interesting framework for looking at some of the tensions within social formations and the slides lists a few dichotomies between them. The third story concerns trust as a transitive property and uses Granovetter’s ideas about weak ties to ask if transitive trust is at all useful in the scenarios where it might exist. The fourth and final story shows an example of some fine “googlestalking” and also how Internet users find new ways of interpreting the digital body and assessing social cues in order to establish trust.Apart from all the fun we had talking to the Innovation TechDev group and the always insightful Caterina we also got the chance to meet up with Yvonne French, senior product manager for the Yahoo! reputation platform, to discuss Yahoo’s point of view on trust topics. Yvonne had a good point that is worth remembering; we know that reputation is context sensitive but that doesn’t mean that the same reputation can not be used in several contexts. The issue is, of course, about finding the contexts where reputation can cross successfully. Furthermore, we can never remind ourselves too often that a context is not defined by an URL–a website might encompass several contexts in the same way that a context might entail many websites.

To finish off the already great day we met up with Tom, Ted and Bill from Opinity for a relaxed yet insightful talk about online identity, trust, philosophy and even some sci-fi… Among other things, we talked about third-party institutions that have the possibility of acting as a trust-mediator in order to guarantee a certain fact about somebody without the necessity to disclose the fact itself to the asking party. I.e. somebody could ask a trusted third party to verify that my email is indeed connected to a real person with a valid credit card without me having to reveal my credit card number or my actual name to them. In many cases this makes sense since the asking party might not be interested in the actual information per se but rather just in the verification of its existence.

On another note, we are hoping to do a small talk about trust tomorrow at BarCampStanford so if you’re in the neighborhood please come join us!

Sort by trust in TrustMail.In this paper Jennifer Golbeck and James Hendler outlines a “reputation network analysis” system for email filtering. The concept is simple: rate everyone you know on a scale from one to ten, and your email application will calculate a “reputation score” for each and every incoming mail message (using a local trust metric algorithm and some FOAF-magic).

Wouldn’t it be great if you could sort your inbox by “relevance”? I thought so too, but then I took a look at my own inbox while trying to think of a rating for each mail that was there. And guess what–it turned out to be quite hard. In fact, in some cases I couldn’t come up with a rating at all, and in other cases I could think of several different ratings for the same person.

Why? Well, we know already that reputation demands context. So whenever I thought of a rating, I had to artificially place the person in a context, which felt somewhat awkward, arbitrary and at times plainly wrong. Which context to choose? What if there were multiple? What if there was none at all?

This is also the reason why the system probably wouldn’t work well anyway. Reputation scores that are inferred by the algorithm are calculated without taking context into account. So let’s say my friend’s boss sends me a mail. I trust my friend, my friend trusts his boss. And yet, the mail from my friend’s boss has little relevance to me. Both reputation scores are accurate in themselves, but when we collapse the contexts around them, they loose their meanings.

So, we need a way of saying “I trust you in this particular context”. But then we run in to issues of etiquette and fingerspitzgefühl. By saying explicitly “I trust you in the context of work” I’m tacitly saying “I don’t trust you outside of work”. Apart from the high cognitive load, I’m actually being rather tactless.

Needless to say, given that I couldn’t even trust my own ratings of my own friends, I’m a bit skeptical of the Trustmail approach. The same critique is valid for many other reputation systems. Clay Shirky puts it rather harsh but well: “Almost all the work being done on reputation systems today is either trivial or useless or both, because reputations aren’t linearizable, and they’re not portable. […] The world’s best reputation management system is right here, in the brain”.

We’re back in San Francisco from a short “vacation” in Los Angeles where we stayed at my friend Johannes Fricke’s (who’s currently blogging for Digital Lifestyle Day) charming Hollywood flat. We also got a chance to meet cool Sean Bonner and super-intense Danah Boyd. Danah was talking nonstop–we only had to throw in relevant keywords like “Reputation!” or “Identity!” every now and then and she would say something brilliant about it. We hope to continue discussions about trust and identity with her soon.

Time flies! We will stay in San Francisco another two weeks and then we’re off to Stockholm again. Tonight we’ll be at the TechCrunch party to represent Plazes.

A $2.33 transaction followed by (incorrect) negative feedback resulted in a yearlong dispute. Gives an impression on how important reputation is to sellers on eBay. [via Opinity]