Nouveau Niche is an interesting profile on Cory Doctorow and his Opencola project. Part Gnutella, part Google, part TiVo, Opencola is a distributed file sharing and search system that works in the background to find things you don’t know exist, by anonymously comparing your search to similar searches made by other Opencola users. One of Doctorow’s goals is to help people find knowledge that they don’t know they don’t know.
Currently, I rely on friends to introduce me to new, cool stuff I haven’t heard of before. With this kind of software, I could cut friends out of the picture entirely and rely on machines. How cool is that?
