From: Hal Finney (hal@finney.org)
Date: Tue Mar 11 2003 - 16:35:19 MST
There's a review of Cory Doctorow's novel in the New York Times at
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/09/books/review/009ANTRIT.html.
As far as "whuffie", we do have a variant via the web interface to the
list at http://www.extropy.org/bbs/index.php?board=67. As you read
the messages you see not only a picture that the poster has chosen to
associate with himself (a very big one for Lee Crocker!), but also the
poster's "karma" score. Anyone can vote positively or negatively for
another person when reading their posts. The postive and negative
values are apparently totalled separately.
The karma scores seem somewhat counter-intuitive. It's not surprising
to see Anders Sandburg at +235/-1 or Elizer Yudkowski at +123/-1.
Amara Graps seems to be the champion at +273/-4. And apparently Harvey
Newstrom hasn't gotten anybody mad at him, at +157/-0.
But Spike at +4/-213? That seems a little harsh. Lee Corbin at +4/-305,
Lee Crocker at +1/-52, John Clark at +5/-224? These are some of the
people I find most informative and stimulating. Rafal Smigrodzki at
+1/-296, Robert Bradbury at +17/-187? I don't really get it.
My own score is a mediocre +8/-46. Pretty discouraging. Lately I
mostly use the web interface so these numbers are being rubbed in my
face constantly.
Hopefully the database is keeping track of who is voting for whom.
It would be interesting to use the data in more sophisticated ways,
such as looking for clustering effects. Maybe all those negative karma
points were applied by a relatively self-contained group. It would be
interesting to see more about how the scores have evolved.
Hal
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