Freeeeedooommmmm

A paragraph from Marc Andreeson’s blog inspired me this morning.

Freedom wins, and openness wins. You can hold it back for some period of time, but in the long run, freedom always wins because freedom and openness let people all over the world be fully creative and innovative in every way they want. And the creativity and innovation that freedom and openness enable will always swamp anyone’s attempt to wall off a proprietary world with tight controls and sharp limitations.

Freeeeedooommmmm = The “Freedom Call”, popularised by William Wallace (aka Braveheart) (but inserted into the NZ consciousness by Mikey Havoc)

Looking through the referral traffic and saw a bunch from this site,   http://www.killerstartups.com/Search/zenbu–New-Zealands-Local-Search-Engine/
They use the wrong URL in the Title but do link correctly at least. I think this is the first 3rd party review I have seen. Nifty.

Yellowbook-Facepages?

An article in Computerworld discusses Yellowpages plans to add “Facebook-style” social networking features. This is a fairly obvious next step but something the big boys have long feared. (Imagine the backlash from angry advertisers seeing negative user comments on their ten thousand dollar ad, big problem. )

So I was a little surprised to read the CIO’s comment that user ratings “tend to be self moderating in the end”. I can only think that the system will be so tightly controlled as to not present any possible problems to advertisers.

Why will Zenbu do and be better? I quote Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, talking about ’search’.

It is broken for the same reason that proprietary  software is always broken: lack of freedom, lack of community, lack of  accountability, lack of transparency. 

Zenbu’s primary focus is on users, not advertisers, and therein lies the difference (that and the difference in employee counts of 649 or so).