Characteristics of Trust in Online Social Networks and Community of Trust as a Special Case of Online Community

With boost of interest in Web 2.0 technologies, appropriate trust models are increasingly more important. First section the paper contains state of the art about trust characteristics, in particular multidimensionality, contextuality, scope of relevance, transitivity and asymmetry. Transitivity as a key aspect utilized in most models is described in a slightly greater detail. Discussion on scope of relevance allowed us to introduce taxonomy of trust from the scope point of view. Based on the general foundation, in the second section we introduce community of trust as a niche type of online community where users trust each other as default and where the trust loses most of its subjective flavour.