So what is to be done? My suggestion is simple: Take the plunge and allow deep linking. Notice I did not say abandon paid registration, in fact, I support it. Publishers can let the bloggers link to any story they post, but limit further consumption of their site to paid subscribers.

I’d be willing to wager that the benefit of allowing the blogosphere to link to you will more than make up for potential lost subscribers. First off, if you as a publisher do not offer additional paid subscription benefits beyond the articles themselves, you’re not paying attention to your community. And in any case, many folks will pay to subscribe to a site which is continually being linked to. In fact, I’d wager that the landing pages from blog links might be the most lucrative place a publisher can capture new subscribers. It’s a massive opportunity to convert: the reader has come to your site on the recommendation of a trusted source (the blog he or she is reading). It’s pretty certain that if you make that page inviting, and use it as an opportunity to sell the reader on the value of the rest of your site, that that reader will eventually feel like the Journal is worthy of his or her support.

If you were to create a user experience specifically designed to foster community and participation, it would be as far from the Google interface as we are to pluto. Google’s brand and tone also feels very uni-directional, not conversational. While it’s easy to create personal maps, and “share them”, it’s against the grain of “why we go to Google” – we go there because “they” have the answer, not to provide answers or exchange with other users. Google’s brand is the guru on the mountain, and this app needs the spreading tree. Third, the rise of content contribution and conversation will begin on scale with Mobile, and to date, this feels disconnected and disjointed.

Some of these are capable of fixes, some feel like very deep ruts in a road that are damn difficult to shake.

* As noted above, Wikipedia isn’t for sale and the community would bail in an instant if Google did somehow get its mitts on the site
* Google Maps works just fine 90% of the time

Err, that’s it really.

BTW: The wiki “meme” spread during a point in time when there was still a strong orientation to media protected by “Intellectual Property” trademarking / branding (even though John Perry Barlow had already eloquently argued many years beforehand how the “protection of ideas” is an outdated phenomenon).

Language, I believe, is not “owned”. I feel it is like a virus that can infect the mind of its host, but it is actually a phenomenon that is separate from its host (note that this seems to contradict Noam Chomsky’s view that language is a part of the human organism; but perhaps the human organism simply has particular properties that are well suited to “host” language). In any case, whether “wiki” or “waki” becomes a meme is not simply “up to” Google (sorry, Sergey — and similar “push media” initiatives (such as Apple ads or brouhaha over Knol) are also becoming less and less effective day by day.

Besides which, buying Wikipedia wouldn’t solve their failures at self correcting communities.

Wikipedia works because of a combination of factors, including being free (in all sense), having a critical mass of users, having motivated users (contributing to the world’s biggest encylopedia is an easy sell), and having content that lends itself to mass editing and refining.

Wikipedia itself has no fundamental system Google can’t just take (all the software is free in any case), and buying it for the users wouldn’t do much aside from making Wikipedia’s editors visit a google server to edit Wikipedia’s information rather than wikipedia’s server. The users wouldn’t suddenly start editing all Google’s own user generated content.