FEED: How would you compare it to the models used by some of the original companies in this space, like Firefly?

DOCTOROW: Well, there are a couple of ways in which I think that we've overcome some of the problems with Firefly. The example of Tivo for the Internet is not because Tivo still exists and Firefly and Ringo don't; the reason that we use Tivo is that Tivo has got a complete feedback loop. Tivo shows you a program; you watch the program; if you don't like the program you delete the program or you give it a thumbs down and it notices that.

In the Ringo world, and I loved Ringo -- I mean half the music in my collection came out of Ringo, but only because I'm a really, really dedicated info whore, an obsessive compulsive manic hand-washer when it comes to finding new music. And, in the Ringo world, what you had to do was remember all the bands that you liked, remember how you felt about a bunch of things. Tell the software about that, wait for the software to bring you back a list of recommendations, go out and buy the music, remember how you feel about the music, and then tell the software about it.

And that feedback loop has fundamentally broken. Even on Amazon it's fundamentally broken. People who like this book also like this book. Well, then you have to buy the book. And you have to read the book and then you have to accurately report how you felt about the book and --

FEED: It's not even people that read this book, it's people who bought this book. So we don't even know if they liked it or not.

DOCTOROW: I think -- and this is a subject on which reasonable people can disagree -- but I think that implicit information that's gathered about how people use information is much more valuable than explicit. The great example of that is the Nielsen ratings. It used to be that the Nielsen ratings were generated with journals. And the average American household according to Nielsen watched Masterpiece Theater and Sesame Street.

Then they switched to set top boxes so they could actually monitor what people watched. And what they discovered was that the average Nielsen family watches naked midget wrestling, "My Twelve-Year-Old Daughter Flaunts Her Breasts" on Jerry Springer, and America's Funniest Botched Cosmetic Surgery. The rise of trash TV over the last decade can in large part be accounted for by the fact that Nielsen now rates shows based on what people actually watch, as opposed to asking people what shows they like.

The problem with that is that it's a closed loop. No one can create a show and insert it into the Nielsen ratings, so what you end up with in that system is just more of the same. But with folders, you end up with more difference because the pool of documents is nearly infinite. I mean, anyone can create a new document and insert it into the network just by reading it, and when they do that, their software observes that they've read it, and observes how they reacted to it. And if anyone comes along and says, "What's good today?" the software will tell them about that document.

FEED: This is the thing that I've been thinking about for a long time. Do systems like this lead towards kind of a more diverse gene pool of ideas or --

DOCTOROW: -- or do they lead to The Daily Me. I don't think it's The Daily Me. I think The Daily Me is predicated on the idea that we'll someday have great artificial intelligence that can pick out among all the documents, just the ones that you'll be interested in. And the way that they'll do that is by finding out what your tastes are and reinforcing it.

I'm a bit of a punter when it comes to AI. I dropped out of an AI program, but never finished one. [laughs] When it comes to AI, I am largely of the opinion that great AI consists of aggregated human decisions, not machine generated decisions.

And that, in a great AI -- that great AI that's composed of aggregated human decisions, will by definition, be diverse. If what you're considering as your primary relevance criteria is "who else likes this?" not "what does this look like?" then you'll get a significantly more diverse pool of stuff. I go out and I read a book and I want to read another book just like it, because I want to find out more about the subject -- that's a useful thing. And chances are, if you and I are very similar and we're reading a lot of similar books that most of the stuff that we'll recommend to each other is similar.

But no two people are alike. You and I have a bunch of interests in common that we've discovered, but I'm sure that we have some interests that are diverse -- that if we were to share with each other, we would find that some of them actually were things we didn't know about but we'd be interested in.

FEED: I totally agree with you, and I'm also fairly optimistic about this stuff, but I guess the counterargument is that network effects start to happen, because certain ideas or documents or songs get recommended by other people and they kind of take off from below, with a positive feedback loop. And by the end you end up with everybody or a huge amount of people agreeing that this one document is completely interesting because they've all been kind of referring it on to their friends or neighbors in the space.

DOCTOROW: But it's not a zero sum game.

FEED: Right.

DOCTOROW: This notion of "mind share" as something like "audience share" is ridiculous. Think about the "All Your Base Are Belong To Us" phenomenon. I remember when All Your Base came out. You know, the first I saw of it was Tim O'Reilly has strung up a 802.11 base station through the hotel that the peer to peer conference was in. So, we were sitting around at breakfast and I fired up my browser and I followed a link to All Your Base. And I showed it to the people at my table, and all day we were talking about All Your Base. But we were also going to amazing panels, talking about interesting stuff, getting on with our lives and so on. And it's not as if All Your Base has blotted out everything else -- it wasn't an All Your Base mania. It wasn't like we became hard-core Deadheads following the All Your Base crew around from city to city.

FEED: Hey, it's still going [laughs] -- it might still do that.

DOCTOROW: There aren't that many phenomena like that anymore. And more and more they're created like 'N Sync. And they come and go. It seems like created mania has a much shorter life span. Much more perishable than the real thing. I mean, there are still Deadheads, and there isn't The Dead anymore.