While the facts can be manipulated, I can check someone’s twitter and pretty quickly deduce if they are legit. The people and networks around them verify them, not just their own published content.

However, how do these networks exchange value? Right now it is knowledge, communication, and access.

Not very sustainable currency, and not readily exchangeable but can have a huge value.

I expect to hear about sales of Twitter accounts. And eventually auctions, and services that facilitate sales becoming commonplace.

However, Twitter’s chat/microblog/link push technology is still not very efficient. I believe the right venture will come along and create a sustainable service, or perhaps several of them.

The deficit market, and online reputation needs, will demand it, and nature abhores a vacuum.

She makes a good point that “good feelings” about people and “exposure” doesn’t mean a paycheck. I think however, that her issue actually gives credence to the need for a defined and implemented Whuffie system.

In other words if indivudals knew they could get proper recognition, credibility, and bennies for philanthropic ventures they might be much more motivated to participate. (end tumbld)

We are not at a point that “reputation economies” are realized. But they could be I think.

Another factor in reputation capital is time.  Famous artisans of yesteryear found recognition after their deaths with their relatives inheriting the public’s license of intellectual properties. However, with global communications and global economics perhaps that is no more? A teenager invents a new process or application and retires a billionaire at 25.

Perhaps we are experiencing a realignment of economics that were formally constrained by location, availability, and time that will demand a metric for social capital?

Link to Fast Company Article

Fast Company tells us about Givewell a non-profit watchdog for the non-profits. While it seems a little overblown to me, the article does bring up the topic of social capital. Suggesting a metric for credibility for non-profits.

A few thoughts about this:

1) Philanthropy must and always be the root purpose of whuffie. Attempts to make it purely a social tool to serve peoples and their groups or as an alternate form of monetization will fail. While it can serve those needs indirectly because it is reliant on the group, the primary group interest is philanthropy.

2) A “Whuffie” metric system would have avoided the debacle altogether. As the fake members in the blog application would have had no cred to begin with.

“Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (2003), by Cory Doctorow
Not only did this novel usher in a new wave of postcyber writing about downloadable brains and uploadable desires, but it also changed the way science fiction writers thought about books. Doctorow has always insisted on making his novels available for free online, and has helped popularize the idea of questioning traditional copyrights in the scifi world. So this novel has changed your world already, by helping to make the business of scifi writing as tomorrow-minded as scifi itself.” Annalee Newitz/i09.com

Person Cory Doctorow

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This video is a continuation of a previous conversation about Google’s Server Farms and how people will store information in the future.

This is fine if you trust the content holders. Google with it’s massive usership continues to uphold high whuffie ratings and is considered “trusted” at this point. Microsoft is not. Apple is for now.

This news item about corruption and mismanagement of information technology reminds me of the intrinsic weakness of government systems: all are weak.

“..the District may be unable to reliably answer the most important security questions: which servers were found, how many laptops were connected to them, what was the chain of custody and who had access to them.”

Healthy information boundaries should be well thought out, tested, implemented, and reconfigured in today’s citizen governemnt democracies.

This is good for our environment. While the power requirements are likely energy intensive, diminishing all those toxic paint chemicals would be nice. full story

via shawnblog

via Futurismic

Barry Steinhardt, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Technology and Liberty Project

Obviously updating our technology is an imperative. However the power of that new technology questions: are lawful citizens safe, afforded their rights, and have reasonable privacy? Who pays when “mistakes are made”?

Who watches the watchers?

Also, what type of unfair advantages or imbalance of power would be created if democratic nations where far more sensitive to individual rights resulting in more privacy for citizens and extreme aggregation of information in their repressive government counter parts?