I recently saw a press release about LiveWire's www.livewire.com, the new beta service that enables users to create rich-content websites and blogs with ease, as well as build community and instant-message one other and it got me to thinking what the components of trust are. Both the behavioral components and the new technologies that support trust and community. The new LiveWire service allows users to build websites and share files simply by dragging and dropping their content files onto the Five Across-powered Livewire application. The web pages can contain blogs, digital photographs, movies, spreadsheets, audio files or other multimedia assets.

My partner in podcasting (Bill Ryan) and I actually tried Five Across Bubbler www.fiveacross.com product to load our last Collaborate! pod cast on "Project and Program Management" and make it available for download at: http://bubbler.net/william_ryan/Collaborate!/. It takes a few minutes to figure out how to use Bubbler but then you can just drag the MP3 file over to make it available.

Tribe www.tribe.net also has recently added "open profiles", allowing users to aggregate data from other online destinations -- basically, from any site that publishes an RSS feed. For example, a Tribe user can set his profile to automatically include the latest posts on his blog (via, for example, Live Journal), the latest photos from his camera phone (via Flickr), his Amazon wish list, and even bookmarks from del.icio.us. Once established, the user's profile automatically updates whenever changes happen at any of those other sites. Users will also be able to obtain a unique Tribe URL to enable them to send people directly to their open profile. The Open Profiles allow you to do blogging on your profile, but they are also used as a way to let people get to know you, and help to build trust and community.

Other communities like "Live Journal" and even AOL have added the ability to Blog and support rich media and a variety of types of interactions. Although LiveWire is mostly about downloading music, the addition of Five Across's Bubbler tool for rapid development of web sites, along with an IM tool that supports presence detection as well as chat, file and schedule sharing makes LiveWare more than a P2P music sharing site, but one more dedicated to creating communities around your interests in music. We have been seeing a number of these sites (content-oriented communities) popping up recently, like Connect Via Books www.ConnectViaBooks.com from the UK which allows you to filter others in the system not by your music playlist, but by your reading list.

However, getting back to the topic of TRUST, in my experience, trust is built in part by what you say and what you do. A small part of trust is built by what you say, and a much larger part by what you do. Blogging allows you to have a more dynamic presence so that people can keep up with what you do and think (if they subscribe to your blog). But it is still your talking about what you did, not someone else experiencing it. It is that personal experience that tends to build trust.

A good example of communities that come together in a short time, have a great level of trust, and do amazing things in a very hostile environment are some of the camps that are created for Burning Man (a 40,000 person event that occurs at the end of August on the BlackRock Playa (desert) see http://www.burningman.com/. One of the groups I am familiar with is called "Opulent Temple," and they are a sound camp with all the DJs and high tech equipment that go along with such ventures. They have created a tribe of the same name (www.opttem.tribe.net) to help coordinate this camp/commuity at Burning Man in much the same way that LiveWire and other sites are brining together a variety of social software tools to help create community virtually.

Although the coordination of the camp occurs using a social tool like Tribe, the 80-100 people that are part of the Opulent Temple camp get a sense of the camp goals or themes, the roles people play at camp, and more detail about who you are. All this is great, yet it is through the pre-camp fund raising events, parties, art shows, etc. that many of the people in this camp get to know and trust each other. After all, unlike virtual communities these people will be camping together in a hot, dusty, chaotic environment for a week and doing amazing things. That takes real trust and coordination to do this!

As Blogging becomes more visual (vblog) and you have the ability to post a video of your daily experiences like Amanda Congdon at www.rocketboom.com maybe your ability to virtually be part of the experience and build trust will be greater? However, until then, I have to rely on referrals from friends and my own experience to determine who I will trust and what I will share!