"..hardware and software systems needed to clear the way for wireless networks made up of thousands or even millions of sensors. These networks will observe just about everything, including traffic, weather, seismic activity, the movements of troops on battlefields, and the stresses on buildings and bridges—all on a far finer scale than has been possible before." Taken from The Top 10 Emerging Technologies on MIT's technology review. Cool term award: German word : "gründlich” means "you do it really right.” Also don't miss the article on Science Fiction and Smart Mobs which mentions japan's "thumb tribes", Warren Ellis' book "Global Frequency", and Howard Rhinegold's book "Smart Mobs".

Bloggers and code monkeys check out: Amy's wonderPortal .05 Beta at her site Domesticat.net that uses PHP script to help folks running multiple global contributors to log posts in real time. She gets my "development of useful software" Whuffie of the day. (I don't have a need for the script nor do I know if it works- I just like people who make the internet easier to use.)

I created a little Flash tribute to the crew of the STS 107 who completed thier final mission the other day. The track is from a member of the The Hooters Eric Bazilian. Normal Whuffie talk will resume soon. Until then maybe we can dare to reach beyond our grasp.

The same vibe I received as a child from The Martian Chronicles (Ray Bradbury 1950); futuristic horror combined with social drama, is what I felt when I saw the shattered helmet that lay in a farmers field. Another nudge from reality reminding me that we are living in the future. The shakey video footage of carnage was strangly reminiscent of 911. I can only imagine the horror of families waiting to see thier children or brothers, or sisters arrival from an ellite 16 day adventure into a world unknown to most but made familiar by the work and lives of those who dare to explore. No shuttle, in it's triumph of technology, just pieces, streaking silently through the sky. I saw a comment from a farmer on the local news "We lost one going up," he said "and now one coming down. But we won't quit." Those farmers have wisdom, not about html, and gadgets, but from years fo observation and from the time that comes from a simple life. His words were not at all poetic, or filled wiht eulogy, yet they were the most profound heard yet. A prayer for the familes and thier loss, and a sulute to the crew of STS 107 William McCool, Rick Husband, Michael Anderson, Kalpana Chawla, David Brown, Laurel Clark and Ilan Ramon. Thanks for a job well done.

Just added the comments link. Many thanks to Mr.PHP AKA Mike for his dogged labors. Make some comments, drink coffee, discuss.

You will note that I added GeoURL link (green button bottom right). Although a little time consuming to set up, and the UI is a little klunky, the concept is great. Allows one to "see" blogs within a 500 mile radius of ones own blog. I think this should also be part of the social software development. Local Whuffie as compared to state, provincial, regional, national, and international Whuffie. Because a person's identity is often so relevant to their location. If you were in France your lo-bandwidth radio signal emitting from your cell phone Whuffie would auto-ping and aggregate Whuffie IDs from those you interacted with throughout the day based on your settings it could sound off according to settings sensing an individuals home, relationship to your interests, and professional credentials. Your cell phone emits a small blip, you ask your waitress where she is from in French, and she replies in English from Idaho! At the end of the day you review your Whuffie log and see that your cab driver is also from Idaho. Those who wish to be anonomous turn off their responders. (Of course does that imply that you have something to hide?) See a WiFi/IM version of this at Trepia.
Thinking about this today at lunch began to hurt my head. The implications of instant social networking in virtual communities with instant reputation monitors was a little dizzying.

"This semantically rich information could be crawled, parsed, and mapped to reveal beautiful and useful patterns about the relationships between people and ideas."
Quote from an archived entry at BookBlog by Adina Levin. The concept of social software relative to identity ware is obviously big talk amongst developers and of intrest to the e-literate. (I think I just coined a term?)
"Each time you look at someone across a conference table or a crowded room, information about who they are and what their background is could appear before your eyes." follow the links to read more of her comments refrenced from a Popular Science article on "AR" or augmented reality.. (Culled from new found Internet Topic Exchange)

While I hate it when blogs just rip news from other blogs, this is somewhat relevant:
Some "Hive" action (culled from BoingBoing) that uses peer technology to speedup downloads. From OpenCola developer Justin Chapaweske, described as "a 'swarming' parallel download tech" (go ahead call me a buffoon for not decoding that netspeak), it appears that it is software that speeds up downloads based on popularity. The problem I have with all those file sharing thingamajigs is I just see SECURITY HOLE staring me in the face, but I like the HiveThink idea of millions of computers sharing resources to make things work better. Visit the OCN. (NOOOO not another dot-acronym!)

An interesting japanese concept related to hives and ad-hocracy and distantly whuffie.

I do love the idea of stock exchange Whuffie. There are some authentication issues with Netmood, but there are with all counters. So I give it my endorsement. Put the code in your Blog, and load the .swf on your server- build your stock. Notice D351gn.com has remained at around 70 points on the rise. (Better then the stock I own in a bankrupt Canadian company. Who keeps sending me quarterly reports...uh.. save the money you spend on those memos of failures please. I know it's the law, couldn't they just email?)
The question I have is, would Whuffie be a commercial endeavor or does that go against the no currency angle Doctorow presents. Or would it be an open source type project? Or maybe a charitable angle? "Heartstrings is pursestrings" I always say. mmmm...you pay one of the "many" companies for your Whuffie reader, to cover their bandwidth costs, but as a non-profit all additional monies go to the poor, the more you pay for your Whuffie Reader, the more Whuffie you get. Of course that would be "Charity Whuffie". It would all tabulate into one score but a good reader would break down the various areas. There could be professional Whuffie. Like you ping your new designer's Whuffie and see that she has amassed major WUPM (Whuffie Units Per Million) for Graphic Design, you now have a new level of respect for her abilities. Your you stop by a science Blog and the reader tells you that this guy has •PHD Whuffie and •NASA Whuffie, so now his Blog is legit. After awhile there would be specialists who could read Whuffie and explain what it was saying. Even traders who would be experts at Whuffie trends. There could be a color signal that tabulates the average global Whuffie level and rates normal at green, above average at gold, and below average at red. That way you could quickly tell at a glance if someone's Whuffie was hurting. Sure there would always be fakers, and people who create bogus Whuffie, but that is how credit reports are, or credentials. It is just an indicator. I think websites and blogs are the first to adopt WSORC (Whuffie System of Reputation Currency) next it would be simple to "ping" those blogs from WAP enabled cell phones and handhelds. The question is how would you get organizations involved?

More on "NetMood"-
Although the website is not too indepth or explanatory, It is pretty easy to install netmoods. (Althugh there was something jiggy with the code provided) I am not nuts about the size or the graphics, but once I saw the stock ticker actaully included my domain with a fluctuating tabulation I was tickeled by this free product. In the immediate I wish they would allow you to download the source .fla code so I could customize the look to my page, I also wish it was smaller.
The ticker made me think: with reputation economics one could actaully "invest" in stocks. Meaning you could invest portions of you own Whuffie on someone else, and as their Whuffie rose so would your "profits". Oooh, that's cool. (note I added the ticker to the right) Keep boostin' my Whuffie baby.

"If at some point in the future we're able to upload our memories onto a chip, and they say that that will be possible in about 30 years," McGee says, "then if that chip were implanted in my clone, I could achieve a kind of immortality."

I watched Vanilla Sky the other night, which to my surprise was better than anticipated. (I actually had avoided seeing it since that Cameron Diaz gal has always freaked me out with her "Joker" like mouth.) Towards the end you realize that what the lead character interprets as a dream is really death with a artificial reality superimposed in his memory. Then I read this article about brain to computer interfacing today. It reminded me of a friend (who looked just like Jim Carey), a young guy in his 20's, whose nervous twitch developed in to total paralysis or as the article coined "Locked-in syndrome". In his case the disease rapidly accelerated and he was gone very quickly, however, before he left, he amazed his doctors, friends, and family with an incredible desire to live. He had asked to apply for a grant for retinal controlled computer, from Bill Gates. His goal was to write a book about his experience. And he wanted to live. No compliant over his "quality of living" or lack there of. He never received the grant but it changed my views. You have to read this article. It is long, but fruitfull.

After Downloading the free Doctorow book, I loaded it onto my Visor Handspring (discount bin at Target $50) I had to go to the Visor home page to download a reader by Qvadis (shareware $20, free for 30 days) and load it on my palm top, that evening I layed in the glow of my auto scrolling handheld with my wife sleeping away by my side. I realized there and then that technology had actually changed how I lived in the past. (note: I created a small flash trailer, for the header, you can replay it or turn off the volume by hitting the tiny dots.)

I just found this "reputation currency" reader on the community section at Kaliber1000. It is called "NetMood" it looks pretty promising as it has RSS. It seems a little klunky but I will let you know more when I scope it more closely. I just added it to the left. Gimme sum' Whuffie.

Minority Report

If you enjoyed the psuedo realscape of Doctorow's latest book Down and Out In the Magic Kingdom but were put off by the ill fated Spielburg/Kubrick movie "AI", make sure you do not miss the Spielburg movie based on the novel by Phillip K. Dick "Minority Report", this somewhat unsung film is great sci-fi adventure. Possibly ingored for it's politically incorrect values of individuality and spotlighting the weekness of socialist controls. The well crafted plotline follows Tom Cruise as the lead cop for a new division called "Pre-Crime" that uses telepaths to arrest murderers before they kill. As the head of a such a socially favored task force has some serious Whuffie, but it soon depletes to the big nada as he is suspected of an eventual murder. I enjoyed the part about new prison reform for all murderers who go into a whuffie-less state of suspended animation. In the film cereal boxes, buildings, newspapers and mall hallways are moving pictures which according to a recently published article in PCUser magagazine is based on an soon to be realized technology that used OLED. My favorite movie of 2002.
More on OLED.

I have done a few design changes, to make it easier to read. How do you like the scroll on the left? (Not sure how many browsers it works on- definitely not IE on my MAC) It drives me a little crazy, but I like the idea of thinking differently. I still need to get a comments link up.

"Imagine something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato that lives by itself in the dark in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka. It is covered with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and it makes them sting. It has no mouth, no genitals, it can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal remote or by voting in presidential elections."

A frightening word picture displaying the powerful creativity of Cory Doctorows mind taken from an interview.
(By the way he's wrong, I do have genitals.)

Also, here is a link to a social game called GNE who Cory Doctorow is an advisor for. (Man that guy gets around..maybe he is a ficticous character developed by the underworld to help us invent a new social paradigm...one including multi-jointed knees and our brains backed up to a hard drive?...neah.
A blog by one of the developers of the game (whuffie: Chrysler Design Award Nominee, and when an auto window is smashed by vandals he makes art from the broken glass, good car-ma?),
(What is the thing he is testing?)

Okay after a little more research I have realized that there are many group thinkers who have been mulling "reputation currency" for some time. And although it is not the source of my college thesis nor am I a PHD I still think Cory's spin is relevant. First off the idea of a popular uncomplicated popularity count with a friendly girlie name like Whuffie is more commercial. Secondly, I simple functioning reader fed with RSS forming virtual IDs could be created pretty quick.

I like the feeling of being swept into group think, maybe I am being idealistic but I like to imagine all those scientist in the Manhattan Project experienced a similar euphoria. (Again I am not a genius. Just a creative...or via Doctorow; an "imagineer".)

It just occurred to me society could use Whuffie for good incentive, for example, when you go to the doctor you get a point for regular check ups in your health whuffie, (heh, my whuffie is a little flat on that one), and if you choose the doctors check-up results would give or take WUPM. Your credit rating, portfolio, liabilities and assets would all tabulate in a financial WUPM, for the less fortunate they could accrue financial WUPM based on movement, like a business venture,education or the ability to create wealth, kind of a curve to keep the wealthy from having to unfair and advantage and giving those disadvantaged incentive to accumulate Whuffie through forward motion.
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Whuffie
the idea of a digital high 5 five, or desktop pat on the back, literal merit points a type of measurable approval rating. Although to me in the book a sad commentary on the superficiality of today's youth movement and their emphasis on social status, monetary wellstanding and popularity. Some of these things do have value. Our American post-modernist society is conflicted. Our movies and books taught individuality, simplicity, intangibles, spirituality, good morals, ethics, and wholesome values, at the same time we exploit hedonism, materialism, political correctness, counter cultureless, voyeurism, sexism and racism.

The idea that people would have fighter plane style heads up computer displays implanted in their corneas. Using a wireless internet connection to access status on people you come in contact with is not that futuristic, from a practical sense and is really not that bad an idea. While I will not jump on the bus to trading in my biologic system for a digitally augmented one, I think there is some value to the concept of Whuffie.

Recently a company came up with moodstats that display on your website with charts and graphs of the whole worlds "mood", while this is mostly novelty, I tried it and although there was some tedium I found it useful study on myself and how much my mood affected my productivity. I think there is some important perspective that can be gain from more digitally implemented human information sources and study.

Imagine if there was a whuffie status on every webpage? How would that effect our perspective on the information that we were reading, viewing and interacting with? Or how about if your cellphone/handheld emitted a Whuffie status when a service guy came to fix the heater, or you had a few drinks with a woman at the bar, or while a sales pitch was made in a business meeting?

First off we need to identify in what ways would we determine the accumulation of Whuffie and how and if it would expire? Further more, how one won merit and from what sources it was derived.

I think you would fill out a form about yourself that would give you points for aptitude for goodness, life achievements, professional and domestic skills, The Whuffie Achievement Test (WAT). Charles Manson would start with minus 5 million units of whuffie (WUPM) (Don't even ask me about prison whufie) Where as Gandhi would have 500 WUPM (Whuffie Units Per Million)

You could also give Wuffie to others. The "stroke" whuffie or whuffie given to you by others would be like an approval rating. (I don't think you could take it back.)

All these could be broken down and viewed with charts and individual unit counts. Also I think new Whuffie categories would keep appearing on your whuffie reader.

Well that is it for tonight's meditation. I will get some shout out connected, and we will think about actual implementation and some pros and cons of actually creating this merit system.

By the way if you have not purchased or downloaded the Cory Doctorow book Down and Out In the Magic Kingdom you should if you want to understand what the dickens I am talking about.

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Ciao