Whuffie: The currency of the meritocracy
Cory Doctorow is fairly well known as a champion against DRM and strict copyright regulations. He’s one of the contributors to the massively popular blog BoingBoing, and also a (science?) fiction writer.
I’ve read all of his work (I think), but the story which has had the most lasting effect on me was his first, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (just an aside here: Doctorow releases all his work under a Creative Commons license, so if you click that last link and look at the top of the page you will see a “Download for Free” link. This is indeed the full novel if you’d like to read it for yourself). In the novel, Doctorow writes of a society in the somewhat near future, but one in which the entire economy has been replaced with a meritocracy. The main determinant of who is given a job is based on their ability to do the job well (with of course some politics added in for a good story). In this economy, the main currency is Whuffie.
If you’ve ever been to the social news sites Digg or Reddit, where stories are moderated up or down by the users, you will already be somewhat familiar with this concept. More or less, if you do something that earns another’s respect, they will “ping your Whuffie” up and vice versa if you piss someone off. In the novel, it is possible to see someone else’s Whuffie balance at any time, giving you a snapshot of how trustworty (or perhaps competent) they are.
I really like the concept behind Whuffie, although it’s not without flaws. It’s clear that a system like Whuffie has some use on the internet, where anonymity and democratization make it hard to gauge whether (for instance) a blogger is truly an expert or an ignoramus with a Google search bar. If blogs had a “Whuffie-o-meter” on the side, it might be a bit more simple to decide if you could trust it or not.
In some ways this is accomplished by Google’s pagerank algorithm. Presumably Google is trying as hard as they can to put the links with the most merit for a given search term at the top of their results. There are, of course, problems with putting our faith in Google. The pagerank algorithm is proprietary, and we have no way of truly knowing how they decide which link should go first. There is an entire industry (Search Engine Optimization or SEO) dedicated to “gaming” Google. Finally, Google is known to alter search results, especially near the top of the listings. For instance a search for maps will have Google Maps at the top.
I think it would be interesting to see a small standalone web applet developed which would allow bloggers and other online personas to add to their website. If visitors liked what they read they could ping it up, and vice versa if the writing were rubbish. You could get really fancy and include Whuffie out a couple of degrees of freedom, however this would likely require a centralized server and would be more logistically complicated. Ideally, this system would be relatively robust against tampering and might take into account some of the drawbacks the initial Whuffie system came with.
Anyone up for doing some coding?
May 9th, 2008 at 3:16 pm
Very holistic thoughts. I like your willingness to actually create a whuffie system. I do see it as more granulated then just blog content. Semantic web technologies like microformats and opendID have really paved the way to a literal application. Thanks for the link.