The Rule Breaker portfolio came up smelling roses Wednesday, rising over 2%. Then again, the Nasdaq did as well, also up over 2%. The other indices (The Motley Fool NOW and the S&P 500) came up pansies, rising less than 1%.

While you may think I'm putting down pansies, let me make it clear: I'm equating them with a good day. In fact, pansies are the first flowers I became acquainted with, at the age of three in Gladwyne, PA, probably because they were punchy, variegated, and right down there on my level.

But I digress. (Though I note in passing that pansies.com ain't happening in any meaningful way yet, on the Internet.)

Celera (NYSE: CRA) rose 9% today, with bounceback Amazon.com (Nasdaq: AMZN) rising 4%, as well. eBay (Nasdaq: EBAY) and America Online (NYSE: AOL), on the other hand, lost ground, restraining the portfolio's gains.

From the very outset of Foolishness, when we debuted our Motley Fool print newsletter in July 1993, we wrote on the very first page, "We want our readers to be our writers." We firmly believe that a group of people working together will provide much better solutions than one or another so-called "expert," and The Motley Fool has worked fervently toward those ends for seven years, and will for the next seven decades. With this in mind, I wanted to highlight in tonight's recap some of the really Foolish notes I read from some of you, while perusing our discussion boards today.

Let's call it, "Foolish Investor Alert!"

Because while our 300 employees strive to be more Foolish every day in our efforts, our efforts cannot hold a candle to the Foolishness of thousands of you who contribute every day to our discussion boards.

On the eBay discussion board was this posting from last week, entitled "Excited about today's dip," written by davidgeorge. First off, what a Foolish sentiment in the title! The notion that one would be excited about a stock dipping (and this is from someone who owns the stock) runs quite contrary to the conventional Wisdom that has some chasing after eighths and sixteenths, and hoping desperately that their stock hits their price alert, what have you. Consider that thought the next time you quote your stocks, or the next time you prepare to add money to your holdings -- perhaps you should actually be "excited about today's dip."

SamIAm99 shared his reactions about what I'll call Celera Uncle Sam Day, as have so many of you this week. In fact, Celera continues to be #1 among the top 25 most active discussion boards on The Motley Fool. His focus in "It just doesn't matter!" is spot-on. "This arbitrarily drawn 'finish line' is irrelevant," he writes, and he's right. I recommend you give his post a moment of your attention, as well.

Further, responding to a Celera thread entitled, "I need a good analogy," ScottAustin found one to describe the difference between Celera's data and that of the Human Genome Project (HGP). "Think of human DNA as 3.12 billion Web pages," he wrote, and casts Celera as a search engine over the information, with the HGP as a yellow-page directory. (Which would you prefer to use? No wonder that large companies like Amgen are paying $25 million to partner with Celera on its data, despite the "free" government data available.)

Remember that Celera's database will grow more valuable as it quickly sequences numerous additional lifeforms -- mice, chimps, Bart Simpson -- with each additional genome further enhancing our understanding of our own (and allowing us more effectively to do efficient genetic tests on lab samples... like Bart Simpson).

I can't say for sure the various ways that Celera will make its money, just as when I bought AOL in 1994, I could never have predicated that the company would rack up $557 million just from ads and e-commerce (not including subscription) for the quarter ended March 2000.

To say nothing of its Time Warner revenues to come. Do you see?

Anyone who suggests to you emphatically that companies like Celera and Amazon.com WILL or WILL NOT make money this particular way or that way is misleading you. The truth is, we don't really know. We're agnostic on any specific prospects, because we don't really know how things will play out.

What is an agnostic? A person who holds the view that any ultimate reality is unknown. That absolutely describes all human beings when they attempt to conceive of a Rule Breaker's business. Consider: Who would've thought that trading Pez dispensers online would lead to eBay? It is impossible to get one's arms around the sum totality of a Rule Breaker's potential. We must therefore be agnostic on specific business possibilities, while focusing our investing on companies that garner tremendous potential.

For instance, when we first bought Amazon.com, we speculated that the company would go into additional lines of business beyond books. I think I felt at the time that music was quite likely, and software too. I did not expect toys. I certainly didn't think "hardware" (as in, wrenches). While these individual business lines represent varying degrees of opportunity and challenge for Amazon, what we can observe is that just a couple of years later the company has already established leadership in some of these areas. The point is, this is way beyond the idea of books, which is all we could point to when we bought.

Now consider Celera. Just as Amazon.com diversified its business beyond where skeptics imagined, so too Celera could easily go into drug development this year or next. In the past, Celera has been a "bioinformatics" company, whose mission was to gather all the letters and words that make up the book of life. Who's to say Dr. Venter won't now determine that he rather likes page 917,438 and focuses his company on developing a biopharmaceutical to fix or improve the human condition? To that end, he has demonstrated a very real ability to lure top scientific talent, and whatever else you want to say about Celera Uncle Sam Day, we can certainly point out that it gave Celera lots more exposure.

Celera has the potential to patent and deliver drugs based on its ongoing genetic findings.

Are we saying this for sure? Absolutely not. We're agnostic on the prospect. Are we "hyping" Celera as the 21st century's great drug developer? If you just read the previous paragraph, you see that our supposition is dispassionately put forward as only that: a supposition. The point is, once again, that Rule Breakers are wild, revolutionary creatures, and are even less predictable than most other things in life. Their "top dog and first-mover" status does give them permission and possibility to broaden their efforts in directions not previously anticipated.

Another reason I like Rule Breakers.

OK, let me close by pointing you to a couple more community contributions. One is a fine posting on our Starbucks discussion board from long-time contributor Absynthe. "Why the drop today?" is the title of the post, and what we find in this "Foolish Investor Alert!" is someone closely aligned with The Motley Fool's beliefs that (in Absynthe's words), "Focus on the minutiae and you will go insane. Focus on the big picture -- does this company have what it takes to become massively profitable, and are they making it happen? -- and you'll probably do what the others probably won't: keep your sanity while making money."

There's also a fine thread on Drive-thru Starbucks (did you know these actually already exist?).

A final excellent community contribution is a brand new Soapbox.com report just out from FoolishErik. This report creatively unites my Foolish Eight small-cap approach with additional numerical metrics put forth by my brother in his most recent investment seminar. FoolishErik combines these two frameworks to create a single screen for promising small-cap stocks. His methodology and actual results are detailed in his Soapbox report, of interest to those who are aggressive investors, allocating some of their portfolios to upstarts. What one might almost call "pre-Rule Breakers."

Finally, ever wanted to come up with a quick mnemonic to remember a phone number (or provide one for your own, to friends)? Gotta love the tool available at www.phonespell.org. Ah... the Internet. This one's a very Foolish keeper.

That's all from RuleBreakerville, tonight. Fool on!

David G.