Those that know me will know that I pretend to kite surf. I actually love the idea of it and while I can go back and forward ok and actually feel quite comfortable flying the kite it scares the b’jesus out of me; that at any point I am going to dragged up the beach and impailed in a tree - if not under a passing bus!

Nonetheless, thanks to Bruce Thurlow of Adventure Tours and Oz Experience fame I have discovered that kite surfing is in fact a right of passage for becoming an Internet Guru. Last week at ATEC (see these posts) Bruce handed me an article from the Sydney Morning Herald (Tuesday April 17th) about Larry Page, Google, and Jimbo Wales, Wikipedia. As the story transpires:

Last summer, Sir Richard Branson invited a few of his friends - (…) Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Jimmy and Rosalynne Carter, Peter Gabriel, Google co-founder Larry Page {and Jimbo Wales, creator of Wikipedia} - to be his guests a Necker, his private island in The Caribbean, for a few days. (..) Now when Wales talks about that heady week, he’s quick to mention how he beat Page in a sailing race around the island. But Sir Richard raised the stakes when he invited the Internet boys to join him in a more thrilling and dangerous pursuit: kite surfing.

As it goes Page is an experienced kite surfer and made no time in getting his back on Wales for the sailing drubbing. In fact, Wales was left grovelling in water going through the lessons of body dragging etc. As it happened the weather turned bad and Wales never actually got up going much to the delight of Page and bitter envy of Wales.

Although no correlation, since then Wales has been promoting his new venture Wikia Search, which is to be a revolutionary mass collaboration search engine while completely bagging Google as producing “too much spam and useless crap”.

So, no love lost then boys. Good news is that when I go to hang out with Sir Richard this summer I will be able to fly with the big boys!

Also, check this video out - a guy gets dragged into the air about 300 meters up by his Kite for 45 seconds!

Tags: Humour

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 24th, 2007 at 4:02 pm and is filed under Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.