(2003-01-26) Cory Doctorow Interview

Good little interview with Cory Doctorow...

• Business Models For Information: The thing about it is that there is synergy. The stuff that I do for Boing Boing is basically research in support of EFF and the writing, and the blog is how I keep track of it. By doing it in public, I get lots of suggestions, and I also get a lot of feedback. Boing Boing is a net time saver because I get more research done with less effort, and I keep track of it better than I would if I were doing it privately. The research that I do on EFF issues is also feeding the fiction.

• and... In the U.S., there is tons of Venture Capital, so everyone went out and started a company. In Canada, there are tons of Socialized Medicine, so everyone became a freelancer. If you're a freelancer (Free Agent) (in the U.S.), and you're in poor health, and you can't get insured (Health Insurance, you are embarking on a kind of slow suicide. And then, in the U.K., they had tons of arts grants, so all the geeks became Net artists, and that's why there's all this kind of strange, Situationist, British Net Art.

• the scary origin of Whuffie (Reputation Management): The word is what we used in high school instead of "brownie points." A friend of mine pointed out, given the era that I went to high school in, that it almost certainly came from "The Arsenio Hall Show": "Woof, woof, woof."