The Standard: Nouveau Niche 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.



The guy who started this company, Cory Doctorow, is a total Disney obsessive, a feted science fiction writer, and just an all around Freak. I like it when interesting people do interesting things and aren't kicked down by The Man.