Yahoo! Holder Building a Dissident Nation

Jackson's plan is ambitious, to say the very least. Generating a business plan for a major corporation in the same way that open-source movement produces software is audacious enough. Even if that were somehow accomplished, coordinating among a group of investors that large would be, if anything, even more of a challenge.

Still, the Internet provides an ideal platform for this venture. In recent elections, the very real sums of campaign contributions that came about as a result of small donors giving bits and pieces are testament to the hidden financial might that the medium can scrape together. Flash mobs -- groups of people who can rapidly coordinate for a purpose, either in one location or on a distributed basis -- also offer evidence of the Internet's ability to harness spread-out sentiment for collective action.

But Jackson's experiment will be worth watching even it falls short of its lofty goals. If the movement picks up some more momentum, Yahoo! management is sure to take note. He is also right in pointing out the potential of large, well-coordinated groups of individual investors -- and this group will play an increasingly important role in the future.