Wikia: Weak, but Working on It

So, the much-bruited Wikia has finally launched, in alpha at least:

Wikia is working to develop and popularize a freely licensed (open source) search engine. What you see here is our first alpha release.

We are aware that the quality of the search results is low..

Wikia's search engine concept is that of trusted user feedback from a community of users acting together in an open, transparent, public way. Of course, before we start, we have no user feedback data. So the results are pretty bad. But we expect them to improve rapidly in coming weeks, so please bookmark the site and return often.

What's most interesting about this is how everything is merging into everything else: Wikipedia's co-founder is doing Wikia, Amazon has an on-demand cloud computing service, Google is beginning to enter the mobile phone business. Everyone is competing with everyone.

Open Government

I predict this will become increasingly common in the future:

Earlier this year, former US senator and presidential candidate Bill Bradley published The New American Story, a book about reforming the American agenda. As part of that process and as a public citizen, he has joined open source activists to produce a Web-based window into the US federal budget.

Jimmy Wales of Wikia.com, Silona Bonewald of the League of Technical Voters, and Taylor Willingham from the LBJ Family of Organizations are others involved in the new initiative. In August, the group will hold a confab in Austin, Texas, to begin development of the ambitious project.

Bradley says, "Democracy is more responsive when people have good information. The purpose of the Transparent Federal Budget is to allow anyone to go onto the Internet and to discover how much is being spent on any particular area such as roads, bridges, breast cancer, missiles, secondary education. You could keyword search to identify specific places in the federal budget where money is being spent on a particular category. Then you could link to the floor debate in Congress about that part of the federal budget and to the votes that were taken about that subject, and who voted which way, and then link to the campaign contributors of that particular congressman or senator. The Transparent Federal Budget would allow citizens to hold elected officials accountable."

Exactly. (Via Linux.com)

Wise Words on Wikia

Here's an example of TechCrunch doing its job well:

I was going through CEO Gil Penchina’s Wikia presentation slides at the Le Web conference in Paris last month and noticed something that made me realize they could be a huge site some day. According to the company, Wikia is producing 2.5 million page views per day and growing steadily, and their new article growth rate tracks the early days of Wikipedia, nearly identically.

Desperately Seeking Search Wikia

It seems appropriate to return to active blogging after hours spent mindlessly tagging old posts (and I hope you lot are grateful) with a mega-story that could well shape the online world next year: Jimmy Wales' planned rival to Google, built on open source technology (Nutch and Lucene), and open source methodology. There's not much more to say at this point, but I predict I (and everyone and his/her dog) will be writing more about it.

OpenServing

How can I resist a pitch like this?

Openserving extends the essence of the open source model — free software and content — to all aspects of web-based computing.

You can set up your own collaborative blogging site.

All articles are sorted democratically.

Sound good?

Here's a bonus: keep 100% of the ad revenue for yourself.

Highly laudable, but it's this bit that worries me:

Wikia founder and chairman Jimmy Wales said, "Social change has accelerated beyond the original Wikipedia concept of six years ago. People are rapidly adopting new conventions for working together to do great things, and Wikia is a major beneficiary of that trend. OpenServing is the next phase of this experiment. We don’t have all the business model answers, but we are confident – as we always have been – that the wisdom of our community will prevail."

I see: so you mean that although you lose money on every user, you make up on volume?

Jimbo's Wikipolitics

Jimmy Wales, (co)-founder of Wikipedia has launched Campaigns Wikia, part of his new Wikia site, the commercial arm of Wikipedia. As the mission statement explains:

For more than 50 years now, we have been living in the era of television politics. In the 1950s television first began to have a major impact on politics, and the results were overwhelming.

Broadcast media brought us broadcast politics. And let's be simple and bluntly honest about it, left or right, conservative or liberal, broadcast politics are dumb, dumb, dumb.

NPOV, anyone?

This website, Campaigns Wikia, has the goal of bringing together people from diverse political perspectives who may not share much else, but who share the idea that they would rather see democratic politics be about engaging with the serious ideas of intelligent opponents, about activating and motivating ordinary people to get involved and really care about politics beyond the television soundbites.

Together, we will start to work on educating and engaging the political campaigns about how to stop being broadcast politicians, and how to start being community and participatory politicians.

With refreshing candour Wales writes:

So, I will frankly admit right up front: I don't know how to make politics healthier. But, I believe that you do. I believe that together we can work, this very election season, to force campaigns to use wikis and blogs to organize, discuss, manage, lead and be led by their volunteers.

Which is fair enough.

Pity that, like The Commons Rising discussed below, his vision has a distinctly parochial feel about it - "this very election season", he writes: not here, mate.

Think big, Jimmy, think global. (Via Boing Boing.)

After Wikia, Qwika: the Wiki Search Engine

The last time I wrote about Qwika, it seemed to be a solution in search of a problem. A recent press release suggests that it's managed to come up with an answer to that conundrum: Qwika has turned into a dedicated wiki search engine.

At first sight, you might think that's rather redundant. After all, wikis are essentially just Web pages, and one or two search engine companies seem to have that sector sorted out. But if you only want to look in wikis, and don't want the other million hits on ordinary Web pages that common words throw up, a dedicated wiki search engine makes sense.

Moreover, wikis do have some special characteristics, as Qwika's Luke Metcalfe explained to me:

[W]ikis are quite different to html documents - they have a good amount of metadata associated with them - edit histories, user information, and data embedded within the WikiMedia format. They conform also [to] a certain writing style, which makes things easier to parse from a computational linguistic perspective. Other search engines are only interested in them as html documents with links pointing to them, so they miss out on a lot.

It's early days yet - both for Qwika and the wikis it indexes (1,158 at the time of writing). But recent moves like Wales' Wikia relaunch, which I wrote about the other day, mean that the wiki space is starting to hot up.

So, in the "One to Watch" category, to Wikia, add Qwika.

Wiki Wiki Wikia

Following one of my random wanders through the blogosphere I alighted recently on netbib. As the site's home page explains, this is basically about libraries, but there's much more than this might imply.

As a well as a couple of the obligatory wikis (one on public libraries, the other - the NetBibWiki - containing a host of diverse information, such as a nice set of links for German studies), there is also a useful collection of RSS feeds from the library world, saved on Bloglines.

The story that took me here was a post about something called Wikia, which turns out to be Jimmy Wales' wiki company (and a relaunch of the earlier Wikicities). According to the press release:

Wikia is an advertising-supported platform for developing and hosting community-based wikis. Specifically, Wikia enables groups to share information, news, stories, media and opinions that fall outside the scope of an encyclopedia. Jimmy Wales and Angela Beesley launched Wikia in 2004 to provide community-based wikis inspired by the model of Wikipedia--the free, open source encyclopedia founded by Jimmy Wales and operated by the Wikimedia Foundation, where Wales and Beesley serve as board members.

Wikia is committed to openness, inviting anyone to contribute web content. Authors retain their own copyrights, but allow others to freely reuse their content under the GNU Free Documentation License, allowing widespread distribution of knowledge and ideas.

Wikia supports the development of the open source software that runs both Wikipedia and Wikia, as well as thousands of other wiki sites. Among other contributions, Wikia plans to enhance the software with usability features, spam prevention, and vandalism control. All of Wikia's development work will, of course, be fed back into the open source code.

In a sense, then, this is yet more of the blogification of the online world, this time applied to wikis.

But I'm not complaining: if that nice Mr Wales can make some money and feed back improvements to the underlying MediaWiki software used by Wikipedia and many other wikis, all to the good. I just hope that the dotcom 2.0 bubble lasts long enough (so that's why they used the Hawaiian word for "quick" in the full name "wiki wiki").