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.