[Search-l] Long FastCompany article on search project

[Seth Finkelstein]

http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/114/features-why-is-this-man-smiling.html

[Just a few excepts]

 ...

The community has responded quite enthusiastically so far, catching
even Wales by surprise. "I just thought we'll put a couple of
developers on it and kind of play with it on the side and see what
comes up," he says.  "But now there's a huge developer community
that's really interested."  As Gil Penchina, Wales's handpicked CEO to
lead Wikia, says, "Since the news leaked out, people have been lining
up, saying, 'I'll clean the toilet bowl, let me in here.'"
 ...

Wales talks about Wikia and his new search project as if it's his
rich-man's toy, his version of playing golf. "As long as it's fun, I
don't care," he says. "As long as we're having fun," he repeats, "and
it's an interesting project and once people are interested, let's take
a shot at it. Search can pay for itself even if you don't become the
market leader. Well, why not?" Go deeper, though, and he betrays hints
of the tenacity and ambitiousness of a true mogul. When Wales talks a
lot about the public good and just having fun, one can forget that
he's the founder of a startup that runs paid advertisements alongside
the content created by its communities. Although Wales still sits on
the board of the nonprofit Wikipedia Foundation, he gave up its chair
to focus on Wikia, a separate and independent for-profit company,
working with Penchina, who used to run eBay's (NASDAQ:EBAY) European
businesses.  (Penchina is more of the inside-operations guy, while
Wales is the public figure.)

-- 
Seth Finkelstein  Consulting Programmer  http://sethf.com/
Infothought blog - http://sethf.com/infothought/blog/
Interview: http://sethf.com/essays/major/greplaw-interview.php