Omidyar Network, the investment arm of Pierre Omidyar’s wealth has made a $2 million grant.  Pierre is the founder of eBay and his personal wealth is roughly $3.6 billion.  The Omidyar Network was started in 2004 and there was about $270 million in assets given to the investment firm.

Some of the Internet companies that the Omidyar Network invested in include Digg, Federated Media Publishing, KaBOOM, Seesmic, Linden Lab, and Wikia.  Wikia is another company that was founded by the Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales.

Wikipedia receives about 300 million monthly unique visitors and is the 5th most visited website in the world.  However Wikipedia runs on donations and does not have any advertising.  At the end of last year, about 125,000 donors invested $6.2 million in helping keep Wikipedia alive.

Of that $6.2 million, $3 million was given by the Sloan Foundation and an anonymous friend gave $286,800. As part of the investment, Matt Halprin of Omidyar will be joining the Wikimedia Foundation board of directors.  Before working at Omidyar, Halprin was the VP of global trust and safety at eBay.

For those of you that do not like the current design of Wikipedia, there is some good news.  The Wikimedia team is working on a new design for the website and if you have an account on Wikipedia, you can check it out.  There is a new beta skin/theme that makes Wikipedia look a little bit more glossier and with less of a traditional look and feel.

Anyone that visits a Wikipedia page will notice a link that says “Try Beta” on the top right.  But having an account is required to enable the “Vector” skin.  Editing Wikipedia becomes a lot easier with the new beta skin too.  The English version of Wikipedia has 2.979 million articles in their database as of right now.

“Have you noticed the “Try Beta” link on the top of Wikimedia project sites?  The usability team is proud to introduce the new skin, Vector, and the enhanced toolbar.   Well, they have been available from user preferences over a month now, but we wanted to reach out to anonymous users.  Please check it out and let us know your thought, if you haven’t tried already,” stated Wikimedia Usability Initiative employee Naoko Komura.

[via LifeHacker]

If I were to compare Jimmy Wales to a political figure, I would say that it would be Bill Clinton. According to Wikipedia, “Clinton presided over the longest period of peace-time economic expansion in American history, which included a balanced budget and a reported federal surplus.” And Wales presides over the largest open source encyclopedia, Wikipedia as the Chairman Emeritus of its parent company, the Wikimedia Foundation. When people needed leadership, they turned to Clinton and when people need information, they turn to Wikipedia.

The reasoning I also chose to compare Clinton to Wales is because of how much the media scrutinized both of their personal lives. Kenneth Starr, a lawyer that took on the Lewinsky scandal revealed personal information of Clinton’s in the Starr Report which eventually led to Clinton’s admittance of his sexual involvement with the White House intern. The Starr Report is justified because it found that the President broke the law, but the media had a field day with it.

ValleyWag, a gossip blog that recently acted as a modern day Starr Report, published personal IM conversations between Jimmy Wales and his former girlfriend, Rachel Marsden. Not cool, ValleyWag.

Publishing this sort content seems legal because of the First Amendment, but it is outright unethical. It is unethical because the conversations were used as a way to defame Wales’ character. Imagine the millions of personal conversations taking place on AIM, MSN, Google Talk, and Yahoo! Messenger. What if these companies started going out of their way to publish conversations taking place on their chat software?

To make matters worse, Wales’ expenditures and actions with Wikipedia got dragged into the media mayhem. Dan Wool, a former Wikimedia board member published an article about how Wales sought reimbursements from the Wikimedia Foundation for various swanky personal expenses. This was denied by current board members in an article released by the Associated Press. Mo’ money, mo’ problems.

Wales left a response to some of the accusations on his blog.

Kaltura, a streaming video web site that recently won the people’s choice awards at the Crunchies and the Open Web Awards, has partnered with the Wikimedia Foundation to add videos to various Wiki projects. The Wikimedia Foundation’s projects include Wikimedia.org, MediaWiki.org, Wikipedia.org, and Wikieducator [see comment]. I believe that this is a great value-add to the educational resources that Wikimedia Foundation provides.

The initiative is currently in Beta and Kaltura is building a larger user-base to contribute to making collaborative videos. Collaborative videos are videos that users can edit using Kaltura software to plug in videos, sounds, and photos that are relevant to the selected subject. These videos will also be embeddable within social network pages and blogs. For more information, check out: http://www.kaltura.com/devwiki/index.php/Main_Page.

Kaltura’s code will become open-source. Video and audio will be encoded in open source formats: OGG Vorbis and OGG Theora [source: Download Squad].

What are your thoughts on videos being embedded on Wikipedia? [comment here]