Is this valuable?

This is the second time I have begun to write this post.

The first time I had a clear series of ideas and points I was going to discuss. The concept of value was my theme; our understanding of value in real world transactions and our augmented perspective of value in online contexts. I had interesting and unusual examples and even a cute little story about sore knees and my brother’s moneybox.

But none of that matters now, for my concept of value has abruptly changed.

As I was toiling away on my post, my computer froze and started making odd little cries and clicking noises.

[NOTE: to anyone else who finds themselves in this situation, your computer has not adopted a Wookiee inspired communication system and is not trying to make friends with you. There is impending doom and you need to turn off your computer and immediately transport it by ambulance to your nearest computer health facility].

I was later to learn that my hard drive had crashed. I had lost every photograph, song, document, design, font, stock photo and dumb little dancing animation that I had collected over the last 10 years. It was all gone.

I now had a clearer understanding of value.

I admitted myself into therapy to deal with the sudden shock and trauma. During deep meditation, it occurred to me how the members of our so-called digital native generation are increasingly shifting our investments into virtual assets. We are investing our money; not into paintings, shares or houses, but the files that we buy from iTunes, the online services we subscribe to and the rights to access social networks, such as World of Warcraft. We are investing our time into Facebook and MySpace pages and establishing our positions within online communities. From an initial glance, it may appear as though these virtual investments are not returning the same financial rewards as comparable investments in traditional markets. However, increasingly, this is not the case.

The relationship between actions, time and money is being explored in creative ways in the virtual world, with two such examples centring on the ‘ripple’ effect.

Ripple.org
This site allows you to use time you spend daily searching the web for the powers of good!

This is how the ripple effect is explained in the site’s FAQs:

"Every time you conduct a search from the ripple homepage or the
ripple toolbar, our search sponsor pays a small amount to ripple.
ripple passes this onto our charities to help them fight poverty."

Effectively, advertisers are donating to charity for the privilege of having you exposed to their ads. Your daily, online actions are translated into a function that provides value to others. It’s a win win situation, really.

The site also provides a ‘click’ mechanism, whereby each time you click to a view sponsor's ad, a designated amount is donated to the specified charity. You can take advantage of this simple mechanism by using the embedded 'click' functions on this blog as well.

Ripplepay
All those contacts that you have formed through your hours on Facebook, MySpace and other social networking sites are now ready for exploitation!

As discussed by Sepp Hssslberger in his blog,

"You create a profile on the system and indicate who you know and how much you trust them by … giving them credit limits. Then whenever you want to make a payment to another Ripple user using only friendly obligations, the system finds a chain of intermediaries connecting you to the person you want to pay, and records the payment in each intermediary's account all the way down the chain. You end up owing one of your "neighbours" on the system, and the payment recipient ends up being owed by one of her neighbours."

Daily, people are finding new ways of extracting the hidden or unexplored value from online activities and communities. But right now, the potential value contained in this vast online world is, for me, overshadowed by the valuables that I have lost. So, at this time I don a face darkened by great woe and start to go about replacing my virtual valuables. I will trawl the Internet for those intangible objects that I hold so dear: a font called Horse Puke, the ‘helium’ version of Usher’s ‘Yeah!’ and the desktop background of a translucent seahorse eating a scuba diver.

However, in proof that our traditional tangible value system is still alive and well, I will also go out and make that necessary investment - an external hard drive to back up all my treasures of virtual value.