WW Coverage

A story today in the Wnnipeg Free Press about WW.

"Where's your Willy?
Financial fanatics find fun following fiver's fate "

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Where's your Willy?
Financial fanatics find fun following fiver's fate

Sat, May 25, 2002

By Carolin Vesely

DO you know where your Willy has been? One Winnipeg man boasts that his hit four provinces in one day. Another admits that his travelled a mere four kilometres in one year, 30 days, two hours and 26 minutes. And it was not in good condition at journey's end.

If your mind is in the gutter at this point, haul it out right now.

We're talking about money, honey. Willy is the Canadian $5 bill, so named because of Sir Wilfrid Laurier, the former prime minister whose face appears on the fin. According to the currency-tracking Web site, some 10,000 people across Canada – and in the United States – are tracking their dough.

In fact, last March, Brian Greenberg was the No. 1 Willy tracker in all the land. Today, he's ranked 8th.

"I find it interesting just to see where the money I've had in my hand goes," says Greenberg, a 29-year-old computer administrator for the University of Manitoba libraries.

To date, he has registered the serial numbers of more than 1,300 bills – mostly fives – and has been able to track about 350 of them.

Try tracking your Willy and you'll find out why it's so wrinkled, tattered and dirty. The whereswilly on-line money tracker was started last February by Hank Eskin, a Web-site developer from Massachusetts. It's a spinoff of the U.S. Web site, Where's George?, which traces American $1 bills. Those bills, of course, bear the face of George Washington.

The system works as a sort of currency chain letter. Here's how to try it out.

Write the Web site address on your Willy to attract the attention of the next person who gets it. (Special ink stamps can be purchased from the site. Greenberg got his own stamp made and it reads: "See where I've been. Watch where I go."

Register your bill – any denomination – by entering the denomination, series, serial number and your postal code on the Web site.

Include a short note about the bill if you like – where you got it, its condition, etc.

Spend the bill. (In tracking lingo, that means it's now "in the wild.") If someone receives the bill and re-enters it on the site, you've scored a "hit" and will receive, via e-mail, a list of the cities and provinces where the bill has been, as well as travel time, distance and speed of each leg.

Greenberg admits that at one point, he was so obsessed with his Willys' whereabouts that he'd receive a notification e-mail on his pager whenever he scored a "hit."

Look at what we found in his "diary," dated March 27, 2001:

"I am now the top Where's Willy user. I have the highest Willy score (388.2), the most bills entered (79), the most bills with hits (5), the highest hit rate (6.33 per cent) of all users. Let's see that place grabbed by someone else!"

Greenberg has since tamed down. Now he'll occasionally register a couple of bills during his lunch hour. "There are a lot of people out there more fanatical than I am," he says with a chuckle.

As we discovered, the so-called Willy Index, which rates trackers and also appears to trigger their primal instinct to have a bigger Willy hit-list than the next guy, is not for the faint of heart.

Check it out: 100* ( SQRT(LN(BillsEntered)) + LN(Hits + 1) ) * [1 - (Days of Inactivity / 90)] (where LN = natural log and SQRT = square root)

We took one look and had to hit the mall and spend a whole whack o' Willys to calm down.

Definitions
In the wild: When a Willy is marked and put back into circulation.
Hit: When someone receives a marked bill and re-enters it on the Web site.
Where's George: United States currency tracker.
Winnipeg fiver: Chilly Willy.
What a Canadian fiver becomes in the U.S.: Wee Willy.
Fin spent between the U.S. and Canada in the absence of protective customs tariffs: Free Willy.
(We made up the last three.)