Taking cues from Wikipedia's distributed model of 'folks-editing' but attempting to mitigate some of its inherent unpredictability with a staff of editors, Jason Calacanis of Weblogs Inc fame has recently beta-launched Mahalo -- which we presume is Polynesian for "we really, really think there's room for another search engine." We know, we know it means "thank you" but can any search engine have hope of catching up to Google?

Tapping into its inner geek, Yahoo! has been working on an open-source grid project with Doug Cutting of Nutch and Lucene (Java-based search library and applications, etc.) fame. Distributed computing projects are all the rage these days and Yahoo! how has a chit in the "we can crank through terabytes too" grid computing game vs. Google.

Vacation is in the rearview which means Buzz Box is back. Rumors about Jenna Bush are in the mix for both Yahoo! and Google's trend trackers...and tales of recovery...of both a scary spider and celebrities with addictions are also hot.

Delta Airlines recently launched SiteSeer, a collection of short travel videos which offer tips on topics like shopping, history and public transportation for major destinations.

WebDriven Blog is taking a brief respite for fresh mountain air and much needed R&R. We'll be back August 15th.

Wikipedia is a great resource if you need to know facts about the world or popular culture -- like say the capital of Moldova or William Shatner's musical career. As the wiki platform grows in popularity, so too its range of applications.

Increasingly, a user looking for your organization's name on a search engine like Google or Yahoo! is going to see a listing in Wikipedia near the top of the search. Wikipedia is a user-generated, user-governed online resource which like a hard-copy encyclopedia provides information on just about any topic you can imagine. But unlike the leather-bound version, Wikipedia can be regularly updated by virtually anyone to reflect new information, correct errors and provide additional resources, images and links. Therein lies both Wikipedia's advantages and its challenges.