What Would Google Do_ - Jeff Jarvis [45]
Google doesn’t view all links from all people equally. The more links you get to your site, the more your links to other sites are worth. Thus Google pays heed to those to whom we pay heed. Google realizes that trust is something we share with each other. Or put another way, any friend of ours is a friend of Google’s.
Google found value in trust. Others are creating systems of trust as the core of their businesses. Facebook helps us build lists of those we know and trust. eBay turned internet commerce’s disadvantage—fear of being robbed by merchants we do not know—into a unique opportunity by becoming the platform for trusted transactions of physical goods among strangers. Studies have shown that consumers are likely to pay higher prices to merchants they trust. Amazon, too, has created a system of trust in its reviews (though they can be infiltrated by both authors and their enemies) and in the money-where-your-mouth-is value of telling us that people who bought this also bought that. Prosper.com (which I’ll discuss in the chapter, “The First Bank of Google”) created a system of trust for person-to-person loans. PayPal did the same for person-to-person payments. We are witnessing the growth of the trust industry.
Social news service Digg has built a content community around trust. Users find and submit stories to the site, and then the community votes on what should go to the front page. That’s editing by the mob and it works (especially if your interests gravitate toward the geeky). Instead of a staff, Digg has thousands of volunteer editors out there finding the interesting and noteworthy news on the web, and competing with each other to get it on Digg first. That makes the service lightning fast, a great source of alerts and updates. Diggers develop a reputation—anointed by fellow Diggers—by finding the most interesting stories fastest.
Journalists I know are suspicious of Digg and of the mob usurping their prerogatives and jobs. One day I sat at a lunch with a news executive and my son, Jake. The executive’s a nice guy but not terribly interesting to a teen. So Jake had his nose buried in his iPhone as the executive belittled Digg, which he decreed to be over already. “Why would anyone trust this thing?” he asked. I turned to Jake and asked him what he was doing. “Oh, Digg,” he said. As we quizzed him, Jake told the executive that he never goes directly to a brand like this man’s newspaper or even to blogs he likes. He rarely types in one of those addresses and wonders what they have to tell him today. Mind you, he reads a lot of news—far more than I did at his age. But he goes to that news only via the links from Digg, friends’ blogs, and Twitter. He travels all around an internet that is edited by his peers because he trusts them and knows they share his interests. The web of trust is built at eye-level, peer-to-peer.
Before I go on, let me acknowledge that, of course, things can go wrong. In 2005, the Los Angeles Times decided to be cyber-hip by inventing the “wikitorial,” an editorial from the paper that the public was invited to rewrite. In no time, the quality of discourse around the first wikitorial descended to the level of that on a prison yard during a riot because the Times had made a fundamental error: A wiki is a tool used for collaboration, but there was no collaborating to be done on the topic of the Times’ wikitorial—the Iraq war. I saw things going to hell and blogged that the Times would have been wiser to have created two wikis—one pro and one con—structured like an Oxford debate. The challenge to the opposing crowds would have been: Give us your best shots and let readers judge. It so happened that Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, saw my post and agreed. He headed to the Times to propose “forking” the wikitorial into two, but by then it was too late. The Times put a stake through the