My librarian pal Dawn Rutherford pointed me toward this Time Magazine article about a class in internet fame.

Basically, the students in this Parson’s School of Design course compete to see who has the most Google hits on their name by the end of the term. They post YouTube videos and LOLcats, engage in hoaxes, start petitions, and make friends on social networking sites, whatever it takes to increase their face ranks. (In the class, they call it “famo.”) The winner gets the best grade.

Spookily familiar, isn’t it?

Click here for the syllabus. And here’s the class logo:

An internet fame course sounds to me like a great cross between fanciful and smart—part instruction and part academic research. Students at Parson’s are planning to be artists, after all, so they should get experience with self-promotion. (Though we authors never do that. NEVER.*)

Anyway, it was just so Extras that I had to pass it on. Thanks Dawn!

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*New Midnighters covers come out in four days!

Thanks to all of you have sent me this:

Yes, it’s a conference about reputation economies that took place back on December 8, at Yale University. Alas, I missed it, but the online description says:

Click here for the rest.

The term “reputation economy” had been around a while when I started conceptualizing Extras. I have no idea when it first came into use. Cory Doctorow invents a reputation-based currency called whuffie in his 2003 book Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, and Howard L. Meyers mentions a similar system way back in 1971 in his story, “All Around the Universe.” And, of course, we’ve all seen websites like eBay, where sellers are ranked with feedback from all the people who’ve bought from them before. That’s a real-life reputation economy that’s been around since 1995.

Obviously, reputation is important to human beings. We want to know who to trust and who not to trust. Alas, whatever kind of reputation system we use—word of mouth, online, bathroom wall—there’s always someone willing and able to abuse it. Pointless celebrities dominate, news channels fabricate, banks collapse, and even best friends lie to us sometimes. (Sad for the world, but lucky for novelists; otherwise a lot of cool plot twists would disappear.)

But you guys know all this. You’re the first generation to grow up with the quasi-reputation economies that are Facebook, Myspace, and Google, all of which show us who has the most friends, links, or comments.

So how does reputation work where you go to school? (Or to work? Or to network?) Who do you trust? Who trusts you? And what’s the worst failure of your local reputation economy that you’ve ever seen?

As those of you who’ve read it know, the action in Extras is kick-started by a secret clique called the Sly Girls. The Girls have invented a highly illegal pastime called “maglev surfing,” which basically consists of riding on top of a magnetic levitation train, trying not to die.

Maglev surfing is not something I’ve done, for obvious reasons. But I did check out a few YouTube offerings to get some sense of what riding an ultra-high-speed train might be like. So I thought you guys might want to see them.

First, this video offers an educational look at how they work, with some pretty cool footage.

For the best shots of travel at speeds of 575kph (357mph), check out this video of a French TGV. The TGV is not actually maglev, because it runs on tires instead of levitating, but it’s still wicked fast. (Faster, in fact, than the trains in Aya’s world, whose engineers are more about energy efficiency than speed.)

And finally, this is the funniest of the videos. It’s just a bunch of kids hanging out near a maglev trial track, waiting for a train to go past. It gives you a really clear idea of how shockingly fast maglevs are as they bolt past, resulting in mild profanity.

Enjoy.

The NY Times Book Review‘s special fall children’s section appears tomorrow, and for once covers a fair number of YA books. It’s online now, headlined with a deservedly wonderful review of Shaun Tan’s wordless graphic novel, The Arrival. (Hey! Shaun will be appearing at Teen Central in NYC today, 2PM! Click here for details.)

The section also has a warm and enthusiastic write up of Extras and the rest of the Uglies series. Full of deliciously quotable blurbs, it makes the coolest comparison ever:

With its combination of high-stakes melodrama, cinematic action and thought-provoking insight into some really thorny questions of human nature, [Extras], like its predecessors, is a superb piece of popular art, reminiscent less of other young adult books than of another pop masterpiece, the revived “Battlestar Galactica.”

Dude! That’s just what I was thinking . . .

Mmm . . . battlestarry.

Click here for the whole review.