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]

“When I die there will be a final waltz playing in my head, that only I can hear,” stated a Wikipedia entry of Maurice Jarre.  Jarre had passed away in March 2009 and a student in Ireland placed the quote there as part of a hoax to see how far it would go.  It went very far in the media.

One of the limitations of being an open source encyclopedia is that it can be an easy target for various hoaxes.  In this case, Ireland University student Shane Fitzgerald added a quote to Maurice Jarre’s Wikipedia page that wasn’t actually true.  Several newspapers ended up printing the quotes and publishing it on their web sites.  Fitzgerald contacted them to let them know it was a hoax, but many of them did not run any sort of retraction.

One thing that I’ve learned about traditional media is that they react similarly to new media.  When a breaking news story hits the Internet it spreads very fast like a virus.  There is limited fact checking taking place every day.

Jarre composed music for films such as Lawrence of Arabia, A Passage to India, Ghost, The Message, and Doctor Zhivago.

Wikipedia may dominate the Internet for references and encyclopedic knowledge, but Encyclopedia Britannica dominates the classroom and is hungry to take it online.  Encyclopedia Britannica is creating a new online version of their service to include user-generated content.  Anyone will be invited to contribute, edit, and enhance their Encyclopedia Britannica experience.  The new website will be rolled out in the next 24 hours according to Encyclopedia Britannica President Jorge Cauz.

Not only did Jorge say that his company is taking on Wikipedia, he also dissed Google in the process.

“If I were to be the CEO of Google or the founders of Google I would be very [displeased] that the best search engine in the world continues to provide as a first link, Wikipedia,” stated Jorge in an interview with The Sydney Morning Herald.  Oh, snap! “Is this the best they can do? Is this the best that [their] algorithm can do?”

Encyclopedia Britannica has been around for about 241 years.  Any changes that are made online will be reviewed by staff and freelance editors before the changes are reflected on to the actual site.  Jorge aims to have a 20 minute turn around time to update the site with user-generated changes.  Some of the changes will be added to the print version of the encyclopedia–which occurs after year two years.

“What we are trying to do is shifting … to a much more proactive role for the user and reader where the reader is not only going to learn from reading the article but by modifying the article and – importantly – by maybe creating his own content or her own content,” added Jorge.

On the Google-Wikipedia relationship

“I think it would be impossible not to look at Wikipedia when one goes to Google. It’s the most symbiotic relationship happening out there,” stated Jorge.  “It’s very much used by many people because it covers many topics and it’s the No.1 search result on Google. It’s not necessarily that people go to Wikipedia.”

[via SMH]

Recently Jimmy Wales put up a plea for an increase in donations for Wikipedia. The open source online encyclopedia has reached its goal of raising $6 million in donations. The $6 million that Wikipedia has raised will keep operating expenses covered up until June 30, 2009.

Jimmy Wales stated that 125,000 have donated $4 million in personal donations and $2 million in gifts.  The $6 million will go towards bandwidth, 23 staff members, and other misc. costs.

“Any donations beyond our $6 million goal are put in a reserve fund, which will help us to offset operating costs beyond the current fiscal year,” stated Wales. “Your continued support will also serve as a much-needed financial safety net if economic conditions continue to worsen globally.”

Jimmy Wales started the Wiki craze and Wikipedia has always been the epitome of open source, a community of developers coming together to make something great.  When Wikia Search first launched in Alpha mode, users did not appear to be impressed, but they were interested in the concept.

Now Wales has fired up Wikia again, but this time it is a more robust and impressive version where anyone that surfs over to the site can vote on their favorite search results based on a 5-star system. 

Below is a screen shot:

Wikia does not index the search results themselves.  The search results are aggregated content by pulling keyword search results from a combination of Google & Yahoo! When a user puts the mouse over a search result, users will be able to vote on the star system and/or Edit, Annotate, Spotlight, Comment, or Delete the result.

I am a strong believer in open source. In Feb. 2007, I wrote an article talking about how Digg could take on Google by leveraging their community-base to vote for search results too.  The concept of Wikia turned out to be pretty similar.

Wikipedia monetizes their site by donations, but how will Wikia make money?  Federated Media.

Despite all the drama that has been happening with Jimmy Wales, Rachel Marsden, and former board members of The Wikimedia Foundation, Wikipedia has attracted further donations. The latest substantial donation was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the amount is at $3 million.

This donation will be paid out at $1 million per year over the course of 3 years. One of the latest initiatives by The Wikimedia Foundation is to assign Flagged Revisions to Wikipedia content which essentially serves as how credible certain content is within the open source online encyclopedia.

The funding will also be used to support other initiatives for providing Wikipedia offline such as in the forms of DVDs or books.

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation originates back to 1934 around the same time that Sloan was President and CEO of General Motors Corporation. In 1892, Sloan enrolled at M.I.T. , the institute that now bears his name as part of their Management program.  About 31 years after graduating, Sloan took the President position at GM and retired in 1956.  For the 10 years after that, Sloan devoted his time to philanthropic activities.

The Wikimedia Foundation was started in 2003 by Jimmy Wales as a non-profit charitable orgnization based in San Francisco, Calif.  The Wikimedia Foundation has 19 employees devoted to wiki-based projects.  Sue Gardner is the Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation.

Information Sources:
[1] paidContent: Wikipedia Gets $3 Million Sloane Foundation Grant by David Kaplan
[2] MIT.edu Background  – About MIT Sloan
[3] Wikipedia: Wikimedia Foundation

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]

I just noticed that on my Alexa.com toolbar (owned by Amazon.com), Google’s rank looked a little different.  The web information company’s toolbar was telling me that Google is no longer glazed in bronze.  It had a silver spoon in its mouth.  Oh for crying out loud, If you don’t get my metaphor, what I’m saying is that Google is now ranked #2 and MSN is ranked #3.

Alexa’s Global Top 10:
1.) Yahoo!
2.) Google
3.) MSN
4.) YouTube
5.) Live.com
6.) MySpace
7.) Orkut
8.) Facebook
9.) Wikipedia
10.) Hi5

Looking at the top 10 web sites, Google has the most presence on Alexa.  They are ranked #2 and they own #4 and #7.  Whereas, Microsoft only owns #3 and #5.  Google also has a presence on #6 because they have an exclusive advertising partnership with MySpace.com.  Microsoft counteracted that move by signing an exclusive partnership with #8 website, Facebook.com. It seems like both companies were playing with their domains a little bit over the last year or so.  We saw the rise of Live.com this past year and GMail.com shifted over to the Google.com servers.  Below is a chart comparison from Alexa:

Notice the instant growth of Live.com?  This is perhaps because Hotmail.com shifted over to Live.com servers.  Seeing as how Live.com is constantly growing and MSN.com is slipping a little bit, I’m curious to see what Microsoft will do with MSN to ensure it doesn’t slip more.  And also, what will Yahoo! do to maintain #1.  Over the next couple years, we should see some interesting changes in the Top 10, especially seeing as how it felt like YouTube and Wikipedia came out of nowhere and claimed their current spots.

Jimmy Wales plans on resuming talks with high level Chinese officials to bring about a discussion on sanctioning Wikipedia in China.  Wikipedia is banned because certain content has been refused by Wales to be censored.  Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft did compromise and edited disapproved content in China. 

In the meantime, Baidu.com has been claiming Wikipedia content contributed by Wiki users as their own according to CEOSmack:

“They do not respect the licence at all,” stated Florence Nibart-Devouard, the chair of the Board of Trustees, Wikimedia Foundation. “That might be the biggest copyright violation we have. We have others.”

Given the fact that China and U.S. are constantly swapping between the highest number of Internet users, it is of Wikipedia’s interest to be sanctioned.  After all, the block means that 100+ million potential visitors are not visiting Wikipedia in China, but Baidu should not be receiving the benefit of Wikipedia-contributed content without proper credit.

“Since we are blocked in China, Wikipedia exists only on one other Web site there, and it is not ours,” added Florence. 

References:
[1] CEOSmack: Wikipedia Founder Jimmy Wales Says He Refuses To Bow To Chinese Officials Like Google & Yahoo Did
[2] WebProNews: Wikipedia Critical Of Baidu

Yesterday, all of the Wikiseek Beta Testers received an e-mail from John Holland, Chief Marketing Officer of Searchme, Inc. that Wikiseek: Community Edition was launched.  Wikiseek was launched around January.  The company that created Wikiseek is called SearchMe and is based in Palo Alto, CA.  The company had raised $5 million in funding for its projects by Sequoia Capital.

Wikiseek is a search engine for Wikipedia and was made with assistance and permission from Wikipedia.  Wikiseek features tag clouds for the search as well.  Below is a screenshot of a search for Tourette’s:

Wikiseek: Community Edition claims itself as “the world’s first wiki-based community-editable search engine.”  However, I believe that Jimmy Wales’ for-profit Search Wikia which is also an open source user-editable was the first.  Using Wikiseek: Community Edition, all users would be empowered to:

1. You may add more relevant sites to these search results.
2. You can change the order of search results to promote sites that are more relevant, or demote sites that are less relevant.
3. You can also remove site that are not relevant, and remove sites that are spam.

There are feedback forums for Wikiseek: Community Edition on Wikia.

A victory for the open source community, Wikipedia has officially entered the top 10 most trafficked websites in the U.S. on Alexa. Jimmy “Jimbo” Wales’ open source encyclopedia joins the rankings of Amazon, Craigslist, Facebook, YouTube, eBay, MSN, MySpace, Google and Yahoo. Wikipedia receives over 42.9 million unique visitors per month.

Where does Wikipedia traffic come from? In the U.S., I’m guessing that search engine optimization (SEO) and school students looking to fill up paper bibliographies play a major role in Wikipedia’s growth. Let’s say that you are a high schooler and you are in a biology class that requires you to write a paper about whales. You type in “whale” on Google and the very first result is Wikipedia.

Wikipedia’s donations currently amount to over $1.1 million, including an anonymous friend’s $286,000 donation, but some Wikipedia fans (including the Wikimedia, Chairwoman Florence Nibart-Devouard) fear that once funding runs out or slow down, Wikipedia may have to go offline until there is another funding option.

In response: “I don’t worry about the future.  Raising enough money to keep Wikipedia going is a big job, but we feel confident that we will continue to be able to do it [source: Arstechnica],” stated Jimbo Wales.  This is definetely an admirable move by Wales.  Contextual advertising could help the company raise 9 digits per year easily, but Wales clearly cares more about what the community sees when visiting his creation.

Seattle, WA based Wetpaint makes it a cinch for users to create wikis.  Wetpaint raised $9.5 million to enhance marketing from Accel Partners and other previous investors, Trinity Ventures and Frazier Technology Ventures.  Accel Partners are also investors in Facebook.

To learn how easy it is to create wikis using Wetpaint, I decided to test it out.  The first step is to name and describe your site.  You decide a name, decide a subdomain name, and select three available categories to choose what your site is about:

Secondly, you decide who can edit your site whether it is everyone, anyone with a Wetpaint account, or only people that you would like to invite:

After this basic information is entered, there are several themes that you can choose from:

The very last step is to actually create a Wetpaint Account by filling out a username, password, and e-mail address.  Once you create an account, a confirmation e-mail is sent to you.

Here’s the outcome of what I created:

The navigation on the right side of the page makes it easy for users to edit content, add comments, e-mail the page, invite others, and add new pages to the wiki.

From a busines strategy standpoint, if Wetpaint was able to raise $14.75 million total within a year, then I would have to admit that the Wetpaint is vulnerable to the threat of substitutes.  However, Wetpaint has an advantage of brand name recognition.  In six months, Wetpaint has generated 150,000 wikis.  The major selling point of Wetpaint is that big media companies, AOL, CBS, T-Mobile, ABC, and several others are creating community sites within Wetpaint.

Other related deals revolving around wikis include JotSpot being acquired by Google and Wikipedia founder, Jimmy Wales’ developing a search engine called Wikiasari.

Yesterday around 10:18PM, an anonymous friend donated $286,800 to Wikimedia Fundraising C.O.R.E., the arm of fund collection for Jimmy “Jimbo” Wales’ Wikipedia. As of right now Wikimedia Fundraising C.O.R.E. has raised over $709,000. Since Wikipedia is a non-profit open-source website, all donations are appreciated. According to Alexa, Wikipedia is the #12 ranked website, so the server costs are obviously very high for Wikipedia.

According to Wikipedia, Wikipedia “receives over 2000 page requests per second. More than 100 servers have been set up to handle the traffic.” Less than a quarter of Wikipedia’s traffic is accounted for by non-registered users who are not likely to be article contributors. In the 4th quarter of 2005, the cost to keep Wikipedia online was $321,000 with server costs accounting for roughly 60%.

About 5 days ago, I had found a post on StartupSquad about an upcoming search engine called Wikiasari was being developed by Jimmy Wales. StartupSquad and Pulse 2.0 wrote that Amazon was involved with the project development. A comment by Jimmy Wales himself on our post pointed out that this information was inaccurate. Then similar incorrect information was written on TechCrunch and Mashable.

Now that I know that Jimmy Wales reads our blog, I’d like to personally congratulate him on the large donation that was given to the Wikimedia Fundraising C.O.R.E.