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.