It's surprising that so few others make this very salient point.

Originally, I thought my distaste for the whuffie concept was rooted in a kind of overall BoingBoing-fatigue, back when Doctorow was publishing a new novel every other week and every hip and cool thing was being "discovered" by Xeni and company -- almost always two or three weeks too late.

But now, as the whuffie concept has floated out and away from its originator, I'm watching the word split in meaning. On the one hand, it can be a way of expressing concern or offering encouragement in an Internet-acceptable way. A scan of Metachat (Metafilter's sidecar social blog) will give you several such examples. But on the other hand, you're absolutely right. For many, this mutual encouragement is becoming less altruistic and more assumptively and promotionally symbiotic. In those cases, the word "whuffie" is substituted for what the world has always known as an "old boy's network."

So what is the solution? How do you spread the gospel that building a community for the sake of bettering a community is worthwhile?