Craig Newmark is the Internet-pioneer and creator of Craigslist. He was one of the first people to see the profitability of the Internet and put it to good use. Gigaom.com did an interview with Mr. Newmark and were able to get him on an incredible interesting and pertinent topic: The question of who to trust online.

He talked about “reputation and trust ruling the web, just the way it does in real life,” and how he was looking to big players such as Google, Facebook and Amazon as the kinds of entities that would have the scale to handle such a distributed trust or reputation management network.

That’s certainly an eye for the future, but I’m not sure it’s something we’re going to see anytime soon. We have no reputation counter in real life, why would we need it online? Still–the idea of a network of trust is appealing, especially for those who have had contact with online scammers and the like. It seems like search engines handle web libel problems just fine to me.

http://gigaom.com/2010/03/18/craig-newmark-on-the-webs-next-big-problem/?utm_source=gigaom&utm_medium=navigation