Denying whuffie.
So I haven’t read Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom yet but I have read this squib on Boing Boing about how the Guardian dubbed whuffie as one of the 25 technologies and notions that hold the most promise over the coming year:
It’s the great conundrum of the web. Why do so many people do so much for free? What do people get out of it? Whuffie—that’s what. Coined by writer Cory Doctorow for his novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Whuffie embodies respect, karma, mad-props; call it what you will, the web runs on it.
See, I use Sitemeter to check the stats on this blog-thing. (Arguably too much.) It’s down this morning; I can’t see how many people have visited, or where they’re coming from.
I’m also using blogrolling.com to build a blogroll. I went to do some work on it this morning, and it’s gone from the internet; there’s something up (at least temporarily) with the URL. Since the rolls are hosted at blogrolling.com, blogrolls all over the net (like the one at Rittenhouse Review) are gone, kaput, nada. —So people who might otherwise have browsed through to new sites can’t. At least, temporarily.
Obviously, there’s plenty of ways to host this stuff yourself and not be dependent on other people’s bandwidth or server issues. But for those of us without the requisite skillset, well, they’re darned useful.
But they’re also a glaring weak spot in any economy of whuffie.
—Oh, don’t mind me. I’m just cranky. More coffee, then off to work. Whee.
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