Two mentions of Whuffie in the same week, one by our esteemed leader at our recent Health 2.0 seminar and one by James Cherkoff over at his Modern Marketing blog, is too much of a coincidence, so I thought I'd jump on the band wagon while there's still time.
Whuffie is the reputation-based currency of Cory Doctorow's 2003 science fiction novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. The book describes a world where the basic economic problem, scarcity of resources, has been resolved and therefore money is no longer necessary. Social status is no longer determined by an individual's wealth but by their behaviour, which is dynamically evaluated and uploaded to the net. Being rude or anti-social diminishes your reputation; doing a good turn, being creative or pleasing people enhances it. The good stuff all contributes to your Whuffie score. Cory would have got Whuffie points for Down and Out being the first novel released under the Creative Commons license; he would have lost points though because it apparently isn't very good (although I haven't read it, so shouldn't really say so for fear of losing Whuffie points myself). Of course, the advent of the social web, with inbuilt popularity indexes, and "deep web" search engines, like Pipl.com, are making Whuffie a reality.
As I have previously written, our behaviour is increasingly transparent, and our reputations only a Google search (or a wire tap) away from a dogged investigator. In the age of the Internet, a decent dose of Whuffie is now a pre-requisite for success — for brands, for businesses and for individuals.