Lots of people have talked in recent weeks about Wikia - Jimmy Wales' (from Wikipedia) next big project. I have mentioned this in conversations over the last several weeks with many colleagues as well. Why? This idea has legs. On first inspection, I love the idea of using the collective knowledge of millions to develop a search engine platform. I honestly was thinking it has a chance to be the next big innovation. If you think about it, Google's algorithm was built in the late 90's (and of course tweaked a bazillion times since) to mimic votes of millions based on the premise of popularity. A link pointing to a site counted as a "vote". If you could get first-hand input from millions instantaneously rather than have to crawl links all day and file site crawls in terabytes and terabytes of data, why not take the easier path?
On further inspection though, I started having second thoughts. Several people in the industry have given me reason to think with Alan Rimm-Kaufman's post being the first to get me thinking differently. Also try this article at Money to read more. I find our current period in web innovation fascinating and I wish I was able to see only even 6 months in to the future. I would be a very very rich man.
