Wikifuture
I went to see Jimmy Wales, of Wikipedia fame, speak today at a talk sponsored by Free Culture NYC. It was a packed house. I tried to take some ZoneTag photos but my fancy new SLVR isn’t that nice. Jimmy skipped most of his talk about Wikipedia (a majority of those attending had edited documents in Wikipedia and were fairly knowledgeable) and went ahead to talking about his new project, a search engine sponsored by the Wikia foundation. It turns out the Wikia foundation has a wealth of specialized content. Where Wikipedia only has 320 articles about the Muppets (Jim Henson, Big Bird, etc.), Wikia has over 3,000! There is general knowledge appropriate for an encyclopedia and then there’s the specific knowledge that is more appropriate for Wikia.
Wikia aims to build an open search. Built on open source tools, open source algorithms to bring trust and openness to search. Google and the rest keep their rule sets hidden away to protect against spammers but that’s just another version of security by obscurity. As Jimmy sees it, the blackhat SEOs have hundreds of thousands to spend on optimization while the little guy is dropped from the rankings. With open algorithms everyone will have a shot.
There are a lot of unanswered questions here, but it is definitely an exiting experiment. One that doesn’t protect users from themselves but treats them with trust, respect and gives them the benefit of the doubt. Wikia sees this open source search as a service for those that cannot compete with Google. Instead, third parties can syndicate the search and compete over user interface, branding and added services.
I also got a sneak peak at the OLPC!
