In the world of the web, you start wherever you do and you go from there. The road any of us travels is our own. The choice is ours. So… most of us would (and many do) say that this makes the web “upfront” in its relationships and empowering through its affordance of choice. I beg to differ.

At major attraction and theme parks, the line-ups for the rides are incredibly well planned. The entrance into these line-ups makes the wait seemingly short. You see the beginning and you see an apparent end. You watch. You see that the people already in line are moving so you assume that it won’t take long. And you see that even in the time it is taking you to decide to get into the line-up, you are already missing some time in what-could-have-been “your wait”. So you decide to get in. You start. You shuffle.

You make your way to the end of “this” wait and realize that you are at a corner. You turn it. Usually you then see another comparable (sometimes even a bit longer) length of wait that needs to be travelled. But… it’s not that long. People are moving. You’ve waited this long. So you sigh and continue. Then you hit the end of this leg. You turn that corner and the process is repeated. But… with each corner turned, the weight of your own investment in the wait increases. If you give up now you will throw away all of the time you have already spent. And, besides, you’ve waited this long so it can’t possibly be much longer. With each corner turned, with each leg of the journey this inner argument continues (and you consciously re-decide each time to go on) until finally you make your way onto the ride.

Often, at the end of it all, you have spent 30, 45 minutes waiting. And/but the argument is not with the theme park you are visiting but with yourself. You have justified and rejustified and solidified your position with the “wait” with each corner turned. So… you are necessarily “happy” (given that most people cannot stand to be unhappy with themselves and their decisions).

Admittedly most people faced with a 45-minute wait for a 1-minute thrill would say “Hmm… no thank you.” But… we are willing to wait 5 minutes. Even if we so do 9 times. And better yet, if during each of our 5 minutes we feel that we are continually approaching our goal, we will be happier still. By this I mean that as long as we are able to step forward, even if it is a shuffle and not a step, we feel as though we’re getting closer and are satisfied. We would likely not tolerate 5 minutes of non-movement.

So… embue all of this with a base work/life ethic that says that we have to earn our pleasure, add in a 1-minute thrill that is as well-planned as the line-ups and… well… you have the success of theme parks.

And… after a (usually expensive) day at such a park, most people will say that they had a great time. Some will return. Some won’t. But few us of will speak of the base disgruntlement that can’t quite be named. How many times can you wait 45 minutes per day? How much did each 1-minute thrill cost? How many of us can stand to admit to allowing ourselves to be manipulated this way and would instead rather say, and completely believe, “It was my choice and I was right.”?

This is heavy duty psychology. And we pay for it. With money. With our time. We call it our pleasure, our privilege. And we actually turn this into fact through our complete belief that this is true.

Are these relationships with our pleasure, our time, our money “upfront”? Well… yes and no. The choices were/are indeed ours. But did/do we realize how manipulative the context is of the choices that were/are ours to make? Ummm… no. Can’t be. Theme parks are thriving.

In exactly an analogous way, I claim that much of our relationship with the world of the web is the same. At least, it has so been historically. What are we accepting, demanding and affording as the choices — the relationships — we have from which to choose?

Five years ago we didn’t speak of “the web”. We called it “the information highway”. At that time, as now, we started wherever we did and we clicked along to the next place. Eventually we either found whatever it was we initially had set out to find or we gave up or got distracted along the way. Certainly for pointed intentions, it took us a disproportionate amount of time searching compared to finding.

Just like with theme parks, the attractions, the line-ups, the investment compared to the return.

But… along came Google and whole industry of searching and search ranking.

For the longest while to rate highly in “search engine land”, it was assumed that the more people/sites that linked to some piece of information (page or site), the better/more important this piece of information was. Many jumped on this bandwagon. Links proliferated. Link farms were set up. Search engine popularity could be bought. And people started becoming disgruntled with the results.

Again going back to the theme parks… most of are indeed wary of the rides that no one is waiting for. And I suppose that it is exactly our own wariness of being wrong — of, ironically, wasting our time — that ultimately makes us choose to assume that if others are waiting this long for this ride, it must be good. But, unfortunately we forget or don’t think about in the first place, that most of the people in line in front of us just went through exactly the same logic. This then is quite a perpetuation (and amplification) of unclear measures for exactly our own intentions.

Thank goodness Google is now beginning to incorporate a quality of link measure into its ranking formula. It is starting to become true that a few relevant, quality links carry more meaning/weight than a way larger list of simply quantity links. Good. I remain convinced that eBay has had quite a role to play in this. I will explain.

For those of you unfamiliar with eBay, eBay is a online auction where people can buy and sell “stuff”. All kinds. And lots of it. In order to so do you become a member. You have a member name and you have a member history that includes how long you have been a member and includes all of your buying and selling transactions (including date and article and more detailed information if it was recent “enough”). Your member information is available to all who wish to see, with other members being able to see “more”. As a member you can buy and sell interchangeably. And when you do buy, the seller is strongly encouraged to rate (provide feedback to/about) you as a buyer. And as a buyer you are strongly encouraged to rate (give feedback to/about) the people you dealt with as sellers. This “feedback” follows all members (buyers and sellers alike) and is available with every member profile.

So… before buying from someone, you have the option of seeing what their history is as a seller. You would likely stay away from sellers with negative comments (“Didn’t deliver.”, “Goods not as described.”, “Rude.”, …) unless you follow the comments and see that the buyers leaving these comments themselves only have negative comments (“Didn’t respond to offer to return money.”, “Changed their mind.”,…). You might be reticent about “brand new” (no history) sellers. And as a seller you might be reticent about a “brand new” (no history) buyer. Anyway… all of this added together results in an eBay world that trades not only goods but feedback (reputation, trust). Sellers who don’t give feedback are scorned. Buyers who don’t give feedback are scorned. And on it goes. It works. There is an upfront notion of respect of intent — to complete a transaction to both parties satisfaction — and a measure of how well the two ends hold/held up their part in this.

eBay then is an example for me of one sort of very active, very specifically and clearly ruled “trust network”. Trust (in the form of feedback) is awarded and earned or is explicitly taken away and not deserved. The level of trust itself is qualified and quanitified in a completely accessible history of feedback. And every participant is expected to carry the responsibility of keeping this trust network going. So/and/but… in the non eBay world of the web, where do find this trust? And do we even look for it?

Well, I think that we are beginning to. We must be. eBay continues to thrive, evolve and expand. More and more of us are learning that we actually want tools that allow us to measure whether something is worth, exactly, “our” while or not. And Google is beginning to shift through it’s active working on the incorporation of relevance of link taking precedence over quantity of link. In the blogging world — now following the cycle of invention of the search world — the starting point is that we equate popularity (number of visits any certain blog receives) with “trust”. Excepting some of us. Rather than basing our trust on “links in”, we base our trust on “links out”.

For me, personally, next links outwards mean… well… everything. As a web traveller I measure much by where someone does or doesn’t take me. If I am not considered, if I am lead to empty or irrelevant places, I will become disgruntled and will leave. But if I am considered, if I am given choices that make sense for me, then I will come back. On the other side, for me as a web presence, people/places I link to either have a specific singular context (like the Google or eBay links above) or carry “a seal of my more general approval” and are found under my “links” menu.

By the latter I mean that general links out have to meet a set of criteria. For me they have to meet my interests (which includes their broadening). They have to match my values (socially aware; inclusive; respectful; non violent). And they have to in turn match my linking outwards criteria meaning that if you were to follow any of the links I have presented here, any links you find from those links would also be ones I am interested in following. But given that these next sets are one level out from me, I do not assume (nor would I wish) that all of those links meet my (collective) interest but I do watch that they match my critera in “values”. This then is the beginning of a trust network. We cannot assume responsibility for links in. We need to assume responsibility for links out. This way we travel through relevance and value. This way trust is perpetuated.

I visualize these trust networks as I do the relationships set out in Plumb Design’s Visual Thesaurus created with Th!inkmap software. In this thesaurus, you start with a single word or node. Branching from this node are related words. Clicking on one of the “linked to” words causes this word to become the central node. And now the links beaming out from it are the words related exactly to it. If you like words and associations and meanings, travelling through the thesaurus this way is quite wonderful. The connections made along the journey are ones you never would have made had the words of the thesaurus not been linked way. And… I see trust networks of web sites, blogs, e-presences this way. I certainly travel and propogate them as such.

And, thank goodness, major search engines are catching on; business models are being developed that explicitly point to functioning this way (Social Venture Network (SVN)); new citizen organized networks are being launched (media venture collective). The word “popular” is being linked to explicitly stated qualifiers rather than base counting of quantity. The “information highway” might indeed be turning in a “knowledge network”. Imagine what the next step could be if we actually continue to demand a “wisdom collective” — the wise use of knowledge networks. This too is exactly our choice. And that would be upfront enough for me :o)

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