Search 2.0: Search and Peer Production

Every once in a while, you come across a new idea that hits you like a bomb. I'm sure most of you know what I'm talking about.

I don't have much time to blog these days, but I got that feeling when I recently came across Wondir thanks to Jeff C.

Now, before I begin, lemme note that this is a great example of what I call coordination arbitrage - smart entrepreneurs making it easy for people to coordinate. The point is that this is another nice data point for my hypothesis that peer production is a disruptive mode of production, and one that is going to be used in many, many domains. So strategists across should start thinking about how to leverage peer production.

OK. Wondir, I think, is a radical innovation in the classic sense. It can offer a discontinuous, order of magnitude shift in efficiency/quality/value. In this case, by scaling up on the demand side, Wondir achieves a huge search cost (and possibly quality) advantage over traditional search engines, for whom search is a (relatively) capital and fixed-asset intensive business.

That means achieving speed and scale economies, and leveraging them to build a knowledge pool - in plain English, getting enough users to ask enough questions, and storing them - to achieve increasing returns, as new users are attracted to the growing knowledge pool.

The most interesting thing, to me, is that I don't think Wondir's really got this yet. For example, you can check out the most prolific users, or the highest-ranked users, but I don't see evidence of a knowledge pool anywhere. For example, I can't quickly search archived questions for possible answers.

But if they get this strategy right, I think Wondir has massively disruptive potential across many spaces and segments of the Media 1.0/1.5 value chain. Publishing, search, social networking, classifieds, and personals are just a few of the spaces/segments that Wondir can threaten - at the limit.

What does at the limit mean, in this case? Well, Wondir's positioned to become what I've termed a reconstructor in my media ppt - a player that reconstructs new casts/streams/micromedia from the most valuable bits of the micromediaverse. Reconstructors offer a significantly more powerful value prop than dumb or smart aggregators, which are their predecessors - in this, case the dumb (semismart, if you like) aggregators are search engines. If all that sounds obtuse, just think about the relative signal-noise ratios.

How can Wondir achieve this? If it were me, I'd think about striking deals with other players whose fortunes depend on speed economies and knowledge pools. Technorati comes to mind, as does LinkedIn. Deals like this could significantly lower the acquisition cost of an answer for Wondir. For example, they could hinge around some kind of open standard for questions/answers - XML wrappers or otherwise - to create liquidity for both questions and answers.

I also think it's important to note that the Wondir has opportunity to build an especially valuable knowledge pool which will realize increasing returns fast, because transactions between users are almost costless, and the relative expected value of a transaction is really, really big. (Dynamics outlined in my peer production presentation).

How can I put the intuition - Wondir, I think, has the potential to be an eBay for knowledge. Uhhh...not to sound like shades of 1999 or anything :)

That said, I think Wondir needs to hire a designer or two, because it's interface is also kinda 1999. I'd also be thinking about what, IMHO, is gonna be the big problem: adverse selection (lo-value questions get asked most/first/select themselves into Wondir). For example, many of the questions on the VC channel are nice examples of adverse selection: they're low-quality questions which most investors wouldn't spend time answering, because entrepreneurs in the know would already have figured this stuff out (I know, I know, that makes me sound like a git...sorry!!).

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