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In part 1, I offered a very basic sketch of the trust infrastructure and suggested these relationships:

1. Trust Providers sit between larger Trust Providers and the consumer public.
2. The "size" of a Trust Provider is determined by the number and size of its "constituents".
3. Constituents are customers, partners, and those who give links to or otherwise support a Trust Provider.
4. One Trust Provider with only a few large constituents may have equal weight with another Trust Provider with many small constituents.
5. In the same way that there are benefits to associating with the well-trusted, there shall be penalties for association with the dis-trusted.

These five bullets suggest a wide opportunity spectrum for those interested in jumping on the Trust Bandwagon. They also suggest behavioral norms for companies of all sizes doing business online under a trust-based e-commerce scheme.

Described below are several likely "activity areas" of interest to the prospective trust entrepreneur, or anyone curious about trust-based commerce models.
Accreditation/Validation/Verification ("AVV")

A significant component of trust is believing that things are in fact as they have been presented. There is an enormous range of opportunity for companies who will place themselves between Trust Providers and the consumer public, or between Trust Providers of different sizes. The basic architecture of a trust-based commerce scheme is hierarchical. There will, however, be many "verticals" joining Trust Providers to the consumer public, involving products and services of every conceivable type. Wherever there is a need to bolster trust between parties, there will be opportunity for some business to step in and fill the trust-void. In the case of AVV services, the bolstering of trust may be achieved as follows:

1. The AVV services provider establishes a standard of performance, and the details of that performance standard are either made fully public or made available to the parties between whom trust is to be bolstered.
2. That standard is vetted by large Trust Providers, constituents or a combination of the two.
3. The Accreditation/Validation services provider creates a recognizable indicator of compliance -- a "trustmark", if you will, so that prospective customers (and constituents) may know that a business has met compliance standards.

The concept of a "seal of approval" is by no means new. What is new is the ability to instantaneously query a database and be certain of basic compliance, and to ascertain "standing". All of this can be integrated seamlessly within the normal transaction process. For example, just as an online merchant today will verify that you have available credit on your card before fulfilling the purchase, in the very near future "transactions" of all types will be trust-enhanced by inline Trust Providers.

In the Adult industry, to offer a speculative example, there is an important records-keeping requirement ( USC 2257), that all publishers of adult material must comply with. The production and distribution of adult material is a complex vertical, encompassing everything from photographers and models, to pay-site operators, to individual webmasters. There are several trust-gaps where a Trust Provider could offer a welcome service. There is an opportunity to offer AVV services between primary producers and those who would buy content to sell it online. There is an opportunity to offer AVV services between affiliate programs and webmasters who would be concerned to send their traffic to non-compliant programs. There is an opportunity to offer AVV services between individual Web sites and the online consumer.

Specialized Search

Even as the likes of Google and the other large search engines are accelerating their indexing of Web resources, and reaffirming their commitment to be as comprehensive as possible, it's obvious that the search engines can't go everywhere, and that there are places they have never been. There are also new content types and data forms emerging every day. As powerful as the search engines are, they need help. And, the potential rewards for helping them achieve their simple, basic objectives are commensurate with their power. Case in point: Technorati.com Technorati sits between the blogosphere and the search engines. Technorati has collaborated with the search engines (namely Google) in creating an infrastructure that makes the collected content of the blogosphere more accessible to the search engines, and therefore to the greater Web. Technorati now sits as a very trusted Trust Provider, boasting useful access to more than 30 million individual blogs, and doing very nicely for its creators under an ad revenue model.

Anyone with unique access to or a unique perspective of Web resources can fill a need and create a lucrative business. The more desirable (the higher the query volume related to) the material in question, the larger the opportunity. If, as in the example of Technorati, creating an access infrastructure is combined with elements of AVV, the opportunity is even larger. Technorati is not simply providing a search and access architecture to the blogosphere, they are also exercising judgment, making trust decisions, and - in effect - increasing the value of the resources they have collected by offering them up in some sort of "approved" form.

Some companies and organizations are sitting on "data assets" that are not available to the search engines, and therefore not available to the Web. This may be because they reside on closed networks, or because the format the data is in may not be compatible with current Web standards. There will be rewards for those who go to the trouble of "harvesting" these data assets and making them available to the greater Web. Similarly, there will be opportunities for businesses who become expert in harvesting unexploited data assets, and who offer this as a service to companies who have them.

Public Trust Relations

This is a natural extension of traditional public relations services, and may either reside within an in-house practice or be out-sourced to a specialist. For many companies, gaining and retaining the trust of their customers, partners, wholesalers and the general public is already a part of their PR activity. But, as the importance of trust enlarges, and new methods and mediums arise for communicating with their constituents, companies are going to need help getting their trust messages across. Blogging will be an important area of activity within PTR.

Trust Technology Development

To answer the deceptively simplistic question: "How do we automate trust?" there will be a need for numerous new technologies, ranging from operating systems, to applications, to protocols, together with the methodologies necessary to provide automated trust assessment in high performance networked environments. Artificial Neural Networks ("ANN's") are consistent with the requirements of automated trust assessment, and will likely be an area of intense development activity during the coming years. While the use of ANN's in the context of TBCM's would make for a rich topic in its own right, for purposes of this introductory discussion there are just two things you should know about ANN's: 1. Before they are operational, Artificial Neural Networks are first "taught right from wrong" by way of carefully chosen examples, and 2. They get better and better at doing their job as time passes. Thus, the benefits of using ANN's is that they both allow for human subjectivity and can be a part of high-demand automated processes.

MetaData Authoring and Data "Conditioning"

The availability of credible descriptions of Web resources is becoming more important every day. The search engines struggle to decipher and record what things are, a task made even more difficult for the pervasiveness of SEO spamming. On the other had, legitimate, ethical producers of Web content struggle to achieve for their pages and sites the exposure they feel they deserve. Somewhere in the middle, between those two, there is an opportunity for a new kind of professional service. Part Search Engine Optimizer, part Information Architect, part Auditor, these new professionals will simply help get your content "in shape" for the search engines and for the Web.

Visibility to the search engines (or lack thereof) is going to become critically important for ALL businesses -- online and offline. As the flow of global Web traffic exerts a stronger hand in determining successful companies and successful brands, traditional offline businesses will have to work to retain marketshare and mindshare.

For those who already have Web resources online, Meta-Data Authors can apply additional descriptive information, categorization and verification services. And, because it will be a part of their job (and not of the in-house IT manager) to keep abreast of the latest standards, formats and protocols, this can be a long-term relationship, with services performed on a regular basis.

If, as in the example under Specialized Search, your company has data assets that are being brought to the Web for the very first time, you will also need help getting them "in shape". The types of services performed by Data Conditioners in this case will depend on the original form of the data and the desired use, but can include everything from document scanning to software development.

Similarly, if the value of your data assets has been compromised by a trust violation, you may opt to acquire the services of a different kind of Data Conditioner, whose job it is to restore lost trust. Depending on the nature of the data and the nature of the trust-lapse, these services may include records auditing, comprehensive data review and perhaps even legal representation, which sets up the last activity area....

Meta-Law: Online Dispute Resolution and Ombudsmanship

While trust-based electronic commerce will help to define parameters and bring more legal clarity to doing business online, there will be a need for mediators who understand Trust. A contributing factor to the present lack of consumer trust is the fact that the law has been playing catch-up to the Web, almost from the very beginning. And it's still trying to catch up. Though we have imported many important legal paradigms to the Web, such as Freedom of Speech, Right to Privacy and Intellectual Property Rights, the law has not been very operative in shaping standards of online conduct for businesspeople. It has existed as a last resort for individuals and companies, after things have gone wrong. As a result, large companies with the financial wherewithal to pay legal fees have been taking advantage of the consumer's relative powerlessness and ignorance of the applicable laws, if any.

For trust-based electronic commerce to work, it must provide a layer of advocacy for the consumer (as well as for any other constituent group). Consumer advocacy is another concept that is not new. In the past, however, its power to effect reform and redress consumer injustices has been limited to use of the media and essentially lobbying. Under trust-basis, persons empowered (elected) by constituents and/or vetted by large Trust Providers (appointed) will exercise significant authority.

Let us suppose for example that an affiliate to a large sponsor program has not been paid what he is owed. Under the presently available systems for pursuing remedy, he can go to the webmaster BBSes and try to get his story heard by the community, or he can turn to the authorities, or he can hire a lawyer, or any combination of those things. But if we have an ombudsman system, within a trust-based commerce scheme, both parties would have the right to be heard and would have to agree to abide by the decision of the ombudsman. Protection and recourse would be afforded to the "little guy" and big companies who had violated trust would face participatory exclusion, if found culpable.

Jack Mardack