Marc Haber replied to my "we need a verb for wikipedia" posting on IRC. He's right, we actually need two.

to wikipede

to look something up in wikipedia, an encyclopedia or a wiki

to wikipedize

to prepare something for publishing or to publish something in wikipedia, another wiki and/or an encyclopedia

In this weekends newspaper was an article on brands in fashion. That the big brands are going down, and instead smaller brands are coming up. This was explained with people wanting to be "hip" and faster than the trend. "Cutting edge".

This is very interesting, since Google basically defied this trend. Google started as this "insider tip" for search engines, back when everybody was using Altavista, Yahoo, Hotbot and such. Back then, Google was "hip" because of it's simplistic interface and quality, and meta searchengines such as MetaGer.

Many of these search engines from back then have gone away. And Google has become a really big brand. Using Google is not "hip", everbody does use it. So what is it keeping people this loyal to the Google brand, and not going for new "hip" stuff like ExaLead.

Another counterexample are iPods. I didn't buy one, because everybody does (and it doesn't play my .ogg files, and doesn't do gapless playback) - but millions of people did. So iPod is another "old-style brand" that just popped up a few years ago.

Will the same thing happen on the net that has been happening in fashion? The next big thing, will it be an influx of "lifestyle search engines"? Maybe built around top blogs like BoingBoing? Should companies try to buy their way into the top blog sites? Or are they actually more likely to kill them that way?

Or is the net actually ahead, and big brands are coming back? But given that one of the key features of so-called "Web 2.0" is the social interaction thing, isn't the net just changing right now to add more "community"?

Will it happen to operating systems and software, too? Apple OSX is doing well in becoming a "lifestyle OS". Windows can't. But how about the Linux UIs? KDE has tons of features, some people say it's overloaded. GNOME is going the other way, keeping things simple and easy - too simple and easy for others. What if we'd "lifestyle" user interfaces, and do the next step past "theming" - offering desktop OS styles like "power user", "hip and quick", "just let me get the work done quickly" and "less is more".

I guess we don't have to workforce for that. Yet.