(2003-01-30) Cory Doctorow Interview

Excellent Cory Doctorow interview going on.

• As to the origin of Whuffie as an idea, well, that comes from the universe of Collaborative Filtering tools online, which started with Ringo at the MIT MediaLab (the WELL's Martha Soukup turned me on to this), and then moved on to encompass things like FireFly, Amazon suggestions, and Google Page Rank. It's really frustrating that none of these tools have been applied to P2P nets.

• I don't think that Whuffie inflation is likely, but I do think there's a real danger of Whuffie Lock-In, Power Law-distribution and Positive Returns- to-scale.

• I think that the ways that we'll see ourselves getting there from here is twofold: (collapse or reform)

• OpenCola - the company I co-founded in 1999 - was started to build a distributed Collaborative Filter. The idea was to make a filter like Amazon's or FireFly's, but one which would a) consider a much wider variety and number of items (anything with a URI) and b) scale as a function of the number of users in the system, since the filter distributed the computational load of the project across all the users in the system.

• (Charlie Stross:) Here's an odd thought: the kind of blood-suckers who get to the top of the dogpile (Company Fuckers) are all very personable, smooth, and outwardly friendly and affable. In fact, they tend to be hyper-socialized: if they aren't, they aren't able to slither into the high-up positions they crave. How does a distributed esteem-measuring system like whuffie cope with smooth sociopaths?.. I wonder, are we selectively programmed by our recreational media habits to defer to people who fit a particular role - popular TV stars (Celebrity) - which appeals overwhelmingly to Sociopaths?