The Com 530 first face-to-face Friday was interesting. We all did a sketch and 90 second presentation. Today we had one live via the Internet/Skype and one recorded. The rest of us plowed on through in class and everyone had something interesting. I am not even going to try to remember all of the details swimming in the continuous partial attention environment we are studying in. This is not bad because we are living the Internet/Web/Media that is in constant change.
I did mine on The Whuffie Bank that just opened its site in the USA two days ago. There has to be some medium of exchange for people, organizations, entities on the Internet and the Web especially in the future as some political and economic boundaries blur. A “Whuffie” is a social medium of exchange developed in the science fiction novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow.
Whuffies are calculated, for the present, according to your presence of Twitter, as they say your reputation. As you tweet and re-tweet contacts are made with others and on the basis of the connections, you might earn Whuffies. The Idea is to move on to facebook.
Part of the idea for the present is once people earn them they can use their Whuffies to say pay someone a thousand Whuffies to design and build a flash banner for you. An interesting idea that may over the years be a foundation for a social currency across the web.
For the present the site indicates something around 3.5 million depositors. The criteria appear to be very subjective subject to significant refining. Several of the big earners appeared to be celebrities who have staffs to tweet and re-tweet for them. So what would this mean in the future.
Potentially the Web(documents) processing and the Internet will become more and more sophisticated and be able to distinguish the individual from the context of their presence. With this we will be able to distinguish the genuine person from all of their extensions (hired help or machine). For now perhaps the rich get richer in terms of Whuffies also. Very interesting times ahead.
Jumping far from the subject in the first half of this blog tonight I saw someone mention H G Wells. If someone reads this and is aware of a writer that might have written what I am about to write please let me know. H G Wells was one of our great 19th century writers and one of the first modern science fiction writers. Many of his conceptualizations in his stories have come to pass and Wells was credited with being the originator. In recent years, probably waiting for a child to get through with dance or soccer or awaiting a client to finish personal therapy I remember coming across some piece of literature that put forward that Wells was combing through papers and hearing people speculate on the future or promote their ideas. Because communications was so poor at the time Wells’ got credit for the ideas as he wrote his novels. Imagine what the forensic information specialists, probably machines, will discover about today.
Maybe they will be paid in Whuffies for their trouble. Whether the Whuffies work or not, only time will tell. WEB 4.0 isn’t far away
iMedia and Beyond 