The beauty of Wikipedia is that it capitalises on a billion small efforts to make a huge, spectacular resource. And now Wikia, the company co-founded by Jimmy Wales (who created Wikipedia) is looking to apply the same principles to search. According to Jonathan Thaw of Bloomberg News:

Wikia Inc., the San Mateo company co-founded by Wikipedia creator Jimmy Wales, plans to challenge Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc. with a search engine that lets users edit and fine-tune its results…

By enlisting programmers and users around the world, Wikia is taking a different approach than Mountain View-based Google and Sunnyvale-based Yahoo, owners of the two most-popular search engines, which keep much of their software code secret…

“We think it’s the sort of thing that shouldn’t be controlled by one company or one group of companies,” [Gil Penchina, chief executive officer of Wikia] said.

Wikia users will collaborate to build an index of Web sites that anyone can edit. They also will be able to fix search results if they don’t give useful information, he said.

After I read that intriguing bit of news, I scurried to the Wikia site to find out more. Jimbo Wales had this to say:

Search is part of the fundamental infrastructure of the Internet. And, it is currently broken… I am looking for… community members who would like to help build people-powered search results…

So what is ‘people-powered’ exactly? I remember when I first heard about Wikipedia: it didn’t make any sense. “You mean anyone can make any change at any time? How come it doesn’t end up as gibberish?” It was patiently explained to me, as I in turn explained to others, that the people who care most about a thing also tend to be the people with the most knowledge, as well as the people with the most passion for making sure the information is correct.

Wales’ vision is a search engine run on the same principles as Wikipedia. I’m certain it will work, too, to an extent. But I see some synergy here between VortexDNA and the Wikia search project. Here’s why: with Wikipedia, there’s an underlying assumption that what people are after is facts, and that there are, after all, only one set of facts that apply to a given situation. Therefore, the more people (and experts) who view a page, and the more tweaks they make to it, the closer to the ‘facts’ that page will become.

Search is different. It has huge barriers in place between the searcher and the ‘facts’. IBM is trying to crack the image-search barrier with its Marvel technology. VortexDNA aims for a bigger barrier: the barrier of popularity. Google’s page-ranking system is essentially a highly complex calculation of popularity. A search engine powered by millions of Wikia members will also produce results based on popularity.

Popularity, though, is nothing more than an illusion. Surely you can think of something wildly popular that just doesn’t suit you (Harry Potter? Cricket? iPods?). Traditional search is a numbers game: you go for the masses and most people will go away happy. VortexDNA is taking a different approach: individuals should get different responses based on who they are, what their core purpose and values are, and what they, in particular, are drawn to.

Right now, the VortexDNA technology is being validated through the MyWebDNA plug-in for Firefox: you answer a short series of questions, a mathematical algorithm calculates a numerical profile, and, the next time you run a Google search, the plug-in circles the two answers most relevant to you.

Imagine the power of combining this type of personalization with the indexing and categorization of a Wikia search project. The Wikia model produces highly robust raw data, while VortexDNA guides you to those sites that you’re really going to care about.

Sounds like a match made in heaven to me.

Earlier this month, Computerworld reported that 175,000 Parisian high school students will be given free USB memory sticks loaded with open-source software. The school board’s reasons are familiar: closing the Digital Divide, less expensive than MSFT, and legal to copy.

This will be good news to my friend Dave Lane, one of the more evangelical of the open-source supporters. I think, in fact, I’d be hard-pressed to find someone as passionate about what they believe in as he is. And, while I can’t say I get as… exuberant as he does, he has certainly made an impression on me. His arguments about quality and fairness and economics make sense. And yet we can all feel the seemingly overwhelming tide of all things Microsoft pulling us out into the current.

Branton Kenton-Dau, the founder of VortexDNA, is fond of saying that we create our own reality. I’m not sure where he got the concept, but I’ve heard it repeated many times—in books, in seminars, in movies. Don Miguel Ruiz, in ‘The Four Agreements’, refers to the reality that we create for ourselves as a dream.

Humans are dreaming all the time. Before we were born the humans before us created a big outside dream that we will call society’s dream or the dream of the planet. The dream of the planet is the collective dream of billions of smaller, personal dreams, which together create a dream of a family, a dream of a community, a dream of a city, a dream of a country, and finally a dream of the whole humanity. The dream of the planet includes all of society’s rules, its beliefs, its laws, its religions, its different cultures and ways to be, its governments, schools, social events and holidays.

Tying this to the previous post… yes, we create our own reality. We also create an infinesimal part of all reality, and even though our part is such a microfraction of the whole, the whole couldn’t exist without us.

The dream of the planet (the developed part, not the majority that cares more for clean water than for open-source code), can be felt through the tide of Microsoft. Why is it so difficult to get people to change to open source? Dave must hear this over and over again: “I have to use Microsoft because everyone else is and I have to be compatible with them.” Reasonable excuse? Absolutely. Possible to act differently from of the planet? Definitely. Dave’s hope, I think, and that of others like him, is that so many people become willing to choose a different dream that it becomes the new dream of the planet.