The BBC has an article on Jimmy Wales’s new open-source search venture, Wikia Search.

It’s not really our place to comment on the likely success of this as a web initiative and it’s not the technology that particularly caught my attention (Google and others are all working on similar participation-search efforts anyway).  What stood out to me was, again, the ability and willingness of web initiatives to embrace and action democratising principles, and to interact with the political sphere (far more than seems to be the case in the opposite direction).

Jimmy Wales says in the interview that the Wikia search will be ‘completely controlled by the community of users’, going on to say ‘I just believe that transparency is an important political issue on the web. One of the things I make an analogy to is openness in a free society, openness in a court system‘.

Is it just me that continues to find remarkable the extent to which the worlds of web and politics are kept at a cautious distance in practice when there are so many synergies in theory?