New communications technologies have led to an increase in media outlets and an increase in interconnections across disciplinary and organizational boundaries. And consequently we're finding that we more frequently have to deal with trust: rather than deciding to trust an institution (say, the New York Times), we are having to make judgments about how much we trust individuals -- and in what areas we should trust them. For that reason, I think ethos is going to continue to be an important area for rhetoric to explore in internetworked media.

Via Ann Althouse, Cathy Gellis talks about trust and blogs, taking a first whack at a taxonomy of trust:

Trusting a blogger's voice is probably the key determinant in whether someone reads their blog or not. But "trust" can mean some combination of many things. For one, it can mean just liking the voice. ...

Then there's "trust" as in trusting the author's ethos. Do you believe what the author is telling you? Do you even care what they might have to say on the subject? Law professors by default seem to have good ethos on law topics, although I suppose it's a rebuttable presumption if they continually post in an unsophisticated way. Lawyers and law students, by contrast, tend to need to earn their ethos, but many do. A series of cogent, thoughtful, interesting posts certainly can snag me as a regular reader. ...

Ultimately "trust" is a complex thing. It's more than subject matter expertise; it's a deeper form of credibility. It boils down to a willingness to join a blogger on their journey, to let them blogger say whatever they want to say when he or she wants to say it and not demand from them "all erudition all the time," or all humor or all whatever. Trusting the voice means trusting the person behind it to feed you the words he wants to convey just because he wants to convey them.

I think there's something in here, but it needs to be dug out a bit more systematically.