Nouveau Niche

Baldwin Louie — Mon, 30 Oct 2000 14:00:00 -0800

It's easy to spot Cory Doctorow at the bar of the Beverly Hills Trader Vic's. Among the surgically rejuvenated matrons, sun-burned tourists and Hollywood machers, he stands out in his retro clothes, horn-rimmed glasses and Drew Carey crewcut, drinking virgin mojitos and playing SimCity on his Handspring (HAND) Visor.

Doctorow, 29, knows as much about tropical drinks as the bartender. Ordering another round of mojitos for both of us, he rattles off the ingredients: "Bar sugar, crushed mint leaves, crushed ice, lime juice, and club soda." How does he know that? "I bought a 1947 copy of the Trader Vic's Bar Guide at a yard sale in Toronto for $2!" he boasts. No rum? "Not tonight. I'm driving to Disneyland after dinner." He'll use any excuse to come to Southern California (like the digital music conference he attended here last week) if it means a chance for him to make a pilgrimage to his mouse-eared mecca.

Doctorow has a thing for Disneyland. As with his obscure knowledge of Cuban cocktails, Sputnik-inspired wall clocks and dumpster-diving for high-tech recyclables, Doctorow is obsessed with the Magic Kingdom. The backgrounder he passes around to VCs describes him as a "Disney freak." He lives in Toronto, but owns an annual pass to the Anaheim theme park, owns the URLs enchantedtikiroom.com, piratesofthecarribean.com, hauntedmansion.com and mrtoadswildride.com, and scours eBay (EBAY) daily for Disneyana. His business card looks like an old-fashioned Disneyland E-Ticket, labeling him "the happiest geek on Earth."

Why so happy? Two reasons. First, after years of writing for obscure science-fiction magazines (even the world's biggest science-fiction magazine is obscure - can you name it?), Doctorow won the prestigious John W. Campbell award for his collected body of short fiction. Second, Doctorow is giddy with the prospect of being "wildly oversubscribed" for the $15 million in second-round funding for his company, OpenCola, which he and 25-year-old John Henson started in 1999. As chief information officer of the open-source software developer, Doctorow believes he will make it possible for consumers and creators of niche media to make a living without resorting to temp work and sponging off parents.

The company's flagship product - also called OpenCola - is a peer-to-peer file sharing and search-engine technology that's a little like Napster, a little like Gnutella and a little like SETI@Home. With 50 employees scattered between OpenCola's Toronto headquarters and its new San Francisco offices, the company hopes to solve what Doctorow claims is "the real problem of this millennium: resource discovery, finding the good stuff. Because everything is out there and available, but how do you find it?"

According to Doctorow, three domains of knowledge exist: the stuff you know, the stuff you know you don't know, and the stuff you don't know you don't know. The stuff you know is like, 'I know how to make brownies,'" he explains. "The stuff you don't know is, 'I don't know how to make nut brownies,' and the stuff you don't know you don't know is there's another confectionery you might like better than brownies." It's this last bit OpenCola offers users. "That's the critical problem," says Doctorow. "How do you find the stuff you don't know you don't know?

Doctorow thinks he's got the answer. Still in alpha, OpenCola (which, depending on the mood Doctorow is in, stands for either Collaborative Object Lookup Architecture, Cows Orbiting at Low Altitude or Cory On Lotsa Acid) is a free, downloadable application that, like Napster, resides on a user's hard drive and links to other OpenCola users' hard drives. The big difference is that it keeps track of users' Web searches and selections, anonymously sharing that information with other OpenCola users who make similar searches.

Here's how OpenCola works. Say you enjoy reading about rock climbing. You'd install an OpenCola program on your computer and feed it a couple of rock climbing articles, or simply type in some keywords, such as "flapper," "hang-dogging" and "dirt me." OpenCola will construct a software robot (sort of a single-purpose search engine) that goes onto the Net to dig up stuff that matches your criteria. It does two kinds of digging. First, it fetches files from the Web just like any other search spider. But the robot goes one step further by looking for other users' OpenCola robots looking for the same kinds of things you are. Then, your robot grabs files the other users have fetched and found worthwhile. In other words, you benefit from the decision-making of the other like-minded OpenCola users. It's like a Web-size version of Amazon.com (AMZN)'s "people who liked that book will like this book" service.

When you get the results of an OpenCola search, you can click a button to "reward" the robot for finding good files, which encourages it to bring you similar documents, or click another button to "punish" it when it finds bad files, which will teach it to stop dragging that kind of trash into your computer. This information is then shared with like-minded users on the OpenCola network and can lead to interesting surprises, says Doctorow. For instance, your robot will eventually start to bring you documents that aren't about rock climbing, but which have been pegged by other climbers as good.

The good stuff gets pushed to the top even more quickly because OpenCola gives extra weight to the decisions of users who consistently pick things that a lot of other like-minded people find useful, creating a sort of reputation economy in which the behavior of the most trustworthy users gets propagated through the network.

Buzzwords aside, the aim of OpenCola is to replicate that infinitely hip friend of yours who points you to songs, video clips and articles he just knows you'll love.

This passion for pushing the obscure comes from Doctorow's experience as the quintessential niche guy. As a science-fiction writer, a Mac user and a Canadian citizen, Doctorow knows all about niche markets. The biggest science-fiction magazine in the world, Analog, has fewer than 70,000 subscribers. There are 10 million Mac users, but it is considered by most Web-application developers to be too much of a niche to bother with. And Doctorow is from Canada, a country of 25 million English speakers who are often not considered cost-effective for publishers.

Doctorow's dream is that OpenCola's technology will help the millions of artists who can't afford to publicize themselves in a worldwide market. He believes OpenCola will make it possible for any arbitrary piece of media to find its audience.

That's a much different approach than Napster or Gnutella, which don't allow musicians to contact or transact business with potential listeners. OpenCola has a mechanism in place for publishers to sell their material, or give some or all of it away. Naturally, OpenCola takes a cut of the transaction; that's the business model. A musician might offer a song or part of a song for free, allowing access to a full download for a fee.

OpenCola also supports the "tip protocol" a la Stephen King, where users download material and pay for it on the honor system, and the unfortunately named "street-performer protocol," where a creator releases a work into the public domain after a certain amount of money has been "thrown into the hat" by any number of customers.

Of course, Doctorow hopes that big companies as well as niche publishers will see the power OpenCola has in connecting consumers with producers.

One gets the feeling that Doctorow is doing OpenCola partly as some kind of postmodern science-fiction performance art experiment, where humans and their personal robots team up to score more whuffie points (used in OpenCola's reputation-ranking system) than anyone else on the network. Or at the very least, it resembles an information-age Rube Goldberg contraption that is dependent on the perfect operation of each component, lest the whole thing collapses in a heap of broken links and fractured ideals.

Indeed, the inspiration for OpenCola was to see if the ideas from his unpublished novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, would work. In the novel, death, disease and poverty have been eliminated, and warring groups of Disney freaks fight for the right to maintain the rides at the original theme parks. The book is a result of Doctorow's quick education in project management, and the concept of whuffie points as the currency of an all-important reputation economy plays prominently in the novel. Doctorow admits there's significant overlap between OpenCola and his fiction. "One of the things we say in our investor presentations is that we are going to put a label on OpenCola that reads, 'Warning: Portions of this software conceived by a science-fiction writer. May not work as advertised.'"

Mark Frauenfelder is a writer and illustrator in Los Angeles.

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