Whuffie: one of the 25 notions for 2003 - QuickTopic bulletin board

I think that Whuffie in meatspace or cyberspace is closely entangled with the idea of an "idiosyncratic Google," the pipe-dream we chased at OpenCola in the early days. An IG is a system that tells you, in response to a query (or via a push-like suggestion mechanism), what the people whom you trust (and the people whom they trust) think is relevant to a given subject.

The reason Whuffie works so well in the Bitchun Society is that there's a universal neural interface that can be used to evaluate this trust-metric. In other words, no one ever has to manually enter trust values for any person -- the trust is extracted directly from your noggin.