My morning commute today featured the net@nite podcast netcast interview with Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales. He had some interesting points about software design supporting communities such as Wikipedia. He draws the obvious connections between the Wikipedia community and those that produce open source software. His commercial initiatives are building on the expertise on community management gained with Wikipedia and it seemed to me that this is the direction that the Internet seems to be taking.

It continues to blow me away how a small group (a half-dozen, in Wikipedia’s case) can create and manage a resource the size and popularity of Wikipedia.

The interview was interesting for its social rather than its technical content. (My question to Jimmy would have been about Wikipedia infrastructure… see how shallow I can be?) 🙂

Cheers,
-pmh