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To: H James Morris who wrote (44127)	3/6/1999 3:28:00 PM
From: Glenn D. Rudolph	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 164684

James, You can trust me on this<G> I'm really bothered. I've spent most of my life in the journalism business, and throughout my career I've believed that my success was contingent on being trusted--by readers, by sources, and by colleagues in the industry. That's a pretty fundamental tenet of journalism: your success, either as an individual or as an institution, requires that you go overboard in appearing to be trustworthy. Over the past few years I've also come to realize that trust is key in any kind of commercial transaction. As consumers we learn to trust certain vendors, a trust that translates into brand loyalty. As business people we learn to trust certain people, a trust that translates into continuing relationships. Now here comes the World Wide Web, and suddenly these fundamental assumptions about the meaning of the word "trustworthy" are under assault. That's what's bothering me. I feel as if the foundation of some of the way I understand my life is weak. Let me take you through a few recent developments, and you'll see why I suspect that we may face the end of trust as we know it, and why we may need a new definition of trust. Who's providing what? Amazon .com recently got nailed by the New York Times for taking money from publishers in return for listing their books in Amazon 's recommendations to its customers. The online bookseller thought it was simply following an industry practice called co-op advertising, in which manufacturers rebate to retailers some portion of the cost of ads that feature their products. Critics thought that the company was choosing not to disclose a conflict of interest. Amazon responded to the Times article by promising to refund the price of any book customers return, regardless of its condition. Personally, I find Amazon one of the most trustworthy sites on the Web. But my trust is based on the fact that I look at Amazon as nothing more than a retailer; when I saw the company choose to defend itself, I realized that Amazon .com sees itself as something more, as an editorial service. The Web shakes things up so much that it's nearly impossible to tell the difference between a retailer and an editor. A retailer's primary job is to be an independent, easily accessible source of cheap products for consumers. One of an editor's jobs is to make the consumer's decision to buy a product a little easier by providing reliable, independent information. Both editors and retailers want to win from their customers a certain trust, albeit of different kinds. Amazon wants to be trustworthy both as a retailer and as an editor, and is discovering that that's a tough line to walk. What role do real people play? In some ways the business of technology can be summed up by a simple sentence: Let's eliminate the humans. In reality the thought is fairly benign--technologists simply want to let humans concentrate on interesting things while they replace human work with digital systems. Who, for example, needs editors or retailers if a computer system can chug away and find you exactly what you need? In fact, according to this view, computers are more trustworthy than humans--they have only our interests at heart, and they lack the ambiguity of feeling that complicates human decision-making. Now, I continue to prefer Yahoo over other search engines. Why? Because Yahoo continues to use human beings--known in the trade as ontologists--to organize its information. Excite, AltaVista, InfoSeek, and the others focus on making better technology to conduct better searches. Yahoo uses plenty of technology as well, but insists that a human being actually look at each Website and decide in which category it belongs. More important, Yahoo doesn't include every Web page in its listing. It makes editorial judgments about what you might want to see. My brother recently told me that he starts searching with the Mining Company (www.miningco.com). The reason: the Mining Company employs humans to organize and manage topics that they are individually enthusiastic about. When you delve into a topic on the Mining Company, you know that a human being--relatively underpaid and untrained, but enthusiastic--has thought about how relevant the content of that topic is. So as far as I can tell, humans still have a role in winning trust--even on the Web...................... This is worth reading at the site below!!!!! ........ cgi.pathfinder.com