DogBytes

Reading through an article in the Washington Post technology section and there was a quote in it from Jimmy Wales, the founder of wikipedia, that warmed my heart...

"The idea that Google has some edge because they've got super-duper rocket scientists may be a little antiquated now," he said.

Right on, Jimmy!  Antiquated...I love it.  Sure, Google and Yahoo have every media company on the planet shaking in their shoes, sure they have geniuses working for them, sure everything they touch seems to turn into gold, but they can't beat ALL OF US, can they?

Wikia, the for profit counterpart to the non-profit Wikipedia, is betting on the power of us to create better search.  They are doing this by releasing a good search engine and then opening up the code to developers, mathmeticians, and any serious thinker interested in working to make it an un-frickin-believable search engine.  The gamble is that open-source will trump closed systems like Google and Yahoo.  As it is, wikipedia is already my number two choice for search.  If I can't find what I'm looking for in the first page of returns from Google, I am off to wikipedia, where I have access to hundreds of thousands of articles.  I haven't had to go anyplace else in the last 3 years. 

When I was about 10, I was a heck of a baseball player, and at recess one day I was giving my teammates a hard time for not performing.  They gave me a hard time back and challenged me to a game - all of them (both teams) against me.  I thought, no problem....3 strike outs and then I'm up....I can do this.  I lost about 20 to nothing, was humiliated, and learned a hard lesson that day.  To me, that is the difference between open source/social media and closed systems/old media.  You can be good...sometimes even great, but you can't beat everybody.  It is going to be interesting watching this one unfold.