So I'm probably the 7.6 jillionth person to weblog this, but I just downloaded Cory Doctorow's novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. I've liked everything of his I've ever read. "Craphound", the story after which his website is named, really knocked me out. I don't actually read Boing Boing very often (only when I see a reference to something on it), but I was one of the beta users for his company's product, OpenCOLA. I have some intersection with Cory's geekosphere, but less than many folks.

There is also an interview with him at Creative Commons. This interview includes his refutation of a statement that I have seen repeated so many times that it threatens to become received wisdom:

There's an old chestnut in online science fiction fandom that the Internet "makes us all into slushreaders." ("Slush" is the unsolicited prose that arrives at publishers' offices -- a "slushreader" wades through thousands of these paste-gems looking for the genuine article). This has always struck me as a pretty reactionary position.

Nearly every piece of information online has a human progenitor -- a person who thought it was useful or important or interesting enough to post. Those people have friends whom they trust, and those friends have trusted friends, and so on. Theoretically, if you use your social network to explore the Web, you can make educated guesses about the relative interestingness of every bit of info online to you. In practice, this kind of social exploration is very labor-intensive and even computationally intensive, but there's a lot of technology on the horizon that hints at this.

I believe that he's the first person that I've ever heard express an opinion that this "everyone is a slushreader" statement isn't true or useful. There is definitely an implication here that online content pales in comparison to that which has been through the publishing machine. While certainly there is a correlation between poor quality and lack of editorial input, I've read my share of really shitty books and stories that have had plenty of editorial machinery applied to them. The place where the slushreader thing gets strained is the thinking that you are always looking for new stuff and have no input from anyone else. In truth, people are always recommending things to each other - that's what makes weblogs tick. I have people recommend things to me all the time and vice versa. I'm only the "slushreader" on the things without recommendations. Doctorow's whole company is about high powered recommenders. I get recommendations from AlexLit such as Barry Hughart's Number 10 Ox books and such. It's an interesting line of thought.