Tracksuit CEO

by Tracksuit CEO

In Vero’s post covering the SXSW Interactive talk:

“Self-Replicating Awesomeness: The Marketing of No Marketing” panel notes
Panel: Deborah Schultz, Chris Heuer, Jeremiah Owyang, Tara Hunt, Hugh McLeod, David Parmet

She notes them mentioning the concept of Whuffie:

“Marketing is the price you pay for creating mediocre products”
The more you give away, the more you get back out of it
The concept of Whuffie

This concept was introduced in the Sci-Fi novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom and according to Wikipedia is defined as follows:

“The usual economic incentives have disappeared from the book’s world. Whuffie has replaced money, providing a motivation for people to do useful and creative things. A person’s Whuffie is a general measurement of his or her overall reputation, and Whuffie is lost and gained according to a person’s favorable or unfavorable actions.”

Sometimes I sit back and marvel at the amount of information I give to Google, I know I’m not the only one. And I do it so willingly and gleefully. Who doesn’t love Google, right? I also wonder if, in the future, there will be some centralized measure of our actions using all of this cached and algorithm’d information. This would be Google’s equivalent to Whuffie and would be a more important rating than even the all-important credit rating. People would have their very own personal PageRank and because of it’s accessibility, we wouldn’t have to go very far to find it, as Google is all about accessibility.

I’ll refer to it now as Grep (Google + Reputation) and I will start trying to be even nicer to people I Gmail and Gchat with.

What hath Google wrought?

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