"Social Capital" relates to the relationships within and between social networks. By its very nature social capital can have various definitions and interpretations but there is no agreed way of quantifying or measuring it.
"Whuffie" is a relatively new term gaining popularity, the Wikipedia definition for Wuffie is
Whuffie is the ephemeral, reputation-based currency of Cory Doctorow's sci-fi novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. This future history book describes a post-scarcity economy: All the necessities (and most of the luxuries) of life are free for the taking. A person's current Whuffie is instantly viewable to anyone, as everybody has a brain-implant giving them an interface with the Net.
Cory is an advocate of Creative commons and his "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom" book can be downloaded for free or sent to you via email in 65 daily instalments.
Tara Hunt has a great presentation on "Makin' Whuffie" that introduces this whuffie / social capital concept succinctly as whuffie = social capital = reputation:
David Cruisckhank posted a great blog in the summer at TechCrunchUK entitled "Trust me, I’m a start-up". In this article David addressed the challenges that start-ups face in relation to earning, growing, rewarding and maintaining trust. "To succeed, start-ups must build trust. Earning trust takes time and start-up businesses are operating from a standing start with no history of competence or credibility. Intriguingly, start-ups are constrained by the very resource they need to thrive."
This post was picked up by Nic Brisbourne who blogged about the "The importance of trust and the value of frameworks"
This reputation can not only be a key to success for a start-up business but also an essential component to any "social networking" business that relies on its members having an element of "kudos" in terms of a "reputation system".
Web2.0 has often been referred to as the "wisdom of the crowds" but has also generated a sense of "madness of the mobs" where the equality of voice can often drown out people that have something valid to say. Many Web2.0 applications have tried to address this by introducing a metric directly relating to kudos or perhaps "whuffie" that can be instantly assessed and therefore filtered:
Building trust and expressing this as a metric to people who do not know you and have not interacted with you online over a period of time is in its infancy on the web. The Google Knol approach of "experts" writing articles but accepting and moderating submissions and amendments from any user shows some potential but the mining of this "trust" related data from comments, citations etc. requires some work before any form of metric can be expressed.
Looking at twitter a persons "whuffie" cannot be instantly viewed in terms of followers, tweets etc. and even when extrapolated via their "social graph" it is unlikely to present any further quantitative data.
Perhaps trust, social capital and "whuffie" can never be expressed as a metric but requires actual social interaction (as clearly introduced in Tara's presentation) to interpret and gain that capital over time, after all not everything can be measured and first impressions are often wrong.
Learning 2.0 - "The Threat (and promise) of Social Interaction" offers an interesting opening: The mere threat of social interaction changes our behaviour…if you know your work is going to be put on public display, you’ll be much more motivated to make it good - to me this is truly embedding "whuffie" within learning whether you are a learner or a "teacher" and this can only be a good thing.