P2PTracker - Opinion | 7 Questions with Cory Doctorow Give us a brief history of OpenCola and tell us how it works.
OpenCola was the brainchild, initially at least, of Grad Conn, John Henson, and me -- the three founders of OpenCola. We set out to build a technology that we could use to stay abreast of some Web sites, finding new stuff that interested us and suggesting it to our attention. Feature-creep and fertile imaginations set in and before long, we were talking about building a gargantuan, generalized, realtime collaborative filter -- whew! -- that is, a piece of software that you could throw any kind of file at, and it would nearly instantaneously put that file in front of everyone who'd likely be interested in it.
In the real world, this turns out to be something very like a "TiVo for the Internet" -- a piece of software that figures out what your about by looking at some explicit information (dropping files you like into your Folder, telling your TiVo to record your favorite program), and thereafter devotes itself to tirelessly scouring the Internet for two things: