The thinking went something like this: Chevrolet is all about being revolutionary, right? (That's debatable, but since Chevy's tagline is "An American Revolution!" this is where all discussion starts at its ad agency.) And if Chevrolet is revolutionary, then its advertising ought to be, too. Ergo, the Chevy message needed to escape the tightly controlled, painstakingly monitored, woefully predictable confines of the 30-second TV spot and roam the online jungle. But everybody's doing that now. So, Chevy marketers thought, let's take this thing a notch further — let's have an online contest to see who can create the best TV ad for the new Tahoe. The wikification of the 30-second spot — what could be more revolutionary than that?

Another member of the audience summed it all up by pointing out that the original Reithian code for the BBC, along with the requirements to inform, educate and entertain, also included the obligations to 'surprise and delight'. It struck me that here was the essence of it. No digitised writing machine could ever manage to achieve those two aims, even if it were laden with all the personality of, say, Bill Gates. …

The Los Angeles Times proved this last week, with its high-minded but ultimately hilarious attempt to 'wikify' its editorial column. No machine would ever have come up with such a ridiculous — yet surprising, delightful, and human — notion.

So why shouldn't the opinion industry find new competition in an open-source citizens' effort? I first started thinking about this as I wondered how to get my pet polling questions asked and answered. I wondered whether there could be a way to get established pollsters to charitably add questions to their surveys. But, of course, that's utterly unworkable: politics, money, work, logistics, and self-interest all get in the way. But then it occurred to me that it would be possible to set up a system for the people to take over polling:

It's the wikification, blogification, Craigsification, bittorrentification, linuxification of opinion.