Last month we had a nerd date and went to see wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales speak at Suffolk University. The topic was Free Speech, Free Minds, Free Markets: Competition and Collaboration. The Bostonist has a great recap of the evening. Wales addressed the future of Web 2.0 and shared his latest project, which is a search-wiki called Wikia Search. This is an open source search engine where user’s can rate results, pushing good results to the top of the page rather than those with the most money.
Thoughts that resonated with me from the lecture:
1. Community Control of products leads to a more global/universal mind thanks to distributed intelligence.
2. A belief in the inherent good of people, meaning that there are more normal people than bad on the internet. Yay Internets!
EasterKiwi 