AboutUs, a Portland, Oregon based startup, which launched in 2006 is focused on creating “about pages” for every domain name and organization. AboutUs offers a community approach to finding out information about an organization or website as it is bu…

p脳梗塞の後遺症血流障害を改善するイチョウの効果について、日本でも、次のような試…

So, in other words, pretty much what Drama 2.0 said:

No other parties truly have an incentive to care and devote time to contributing. In essence, this is nothing more than a Web 2.0 link farm.

Maybe this is what happens when you monetize wiki.

And then, on top of that, you get things like:

“ummm… blog…not wiki…. assumed”

You want me to put my business in this yahoo’s hands? Putz.

1) Was it wise to invest in AboutUs?

2) Is it ethical to populate the site the way they did?

3) Is there value, or the potential for value, in the AboutUs content?

RE: #1 … I have to assume there is a business plan (even if the plan is just a philosophy), and that they are probably looking at a Wikipedia kind of arc. It would be very interesting to see how this kind of a site might be received outside of the U.S., in places where wikis are king and proprietary content is not nearly the same focus. That $1m probably won’t buy profits for the next five years, but it could seed the things to make an environment ripe for profit in that time. As someone posted above, the jury is out on the sanity of the decision. Bottom line for me: it’s not my money.

RE: #2 … I’m not sure I can speak to the ethics, but I can to the sensitivity to user experience.

It would have been nice if the process of release had included usability, not just of the MediaWiki interface (which has to be improved, to make it more accessible to the potential users of this site) but also for the impact on businesses and organization. That might have led to insights about some of the issues raised (RSS feeds, opt-out) that would have been part of the initial release. Those things aren’t beyond fixing, but much of the negative above reaction might have been dulled with the reassurance that all of this was considered and addressed with more than “anyone can edit it”

That said, when copyright infringement occurs, isn’t the first step to request the content be removed? How is that different with AboutUs, except that you can avoid the request part and just do it yourself? Protected content finds its way to Wikipedia, too, but the community responds by being sensitive to such edits. The bulk of the information here and the bulk of the people affected are not going to raise any red flags. For those situations and reactionaries who are concerned with the content, the solution seems completely within your control.

RE: #3 … The value of any wiki is not its content. It is its community. The detractors above (and even some supporting responses) tend to focus on whether a copy of commonly found information is ever going to be useful. Probably not. But the community that forms to caretake that content, massaging it, protecting it, expanding on it … The community is very valuable. My guess is THAT is what the investors are ultimately interested in. The quality of the content this community generates is not going to be an exponential, not a multiple, of the number of people invovled.

And it is not the text that becomes important, but the links that join that text. Google is not going to be able to spider for context as efficiently or deeply as humans trying to make sense of what fits together. As these starter pages start spawning new kinds of articles, the value will become very apparent. Potentially, AboutUs can be something VERY different from any existing search tool.

Yes, technically anyone with the time available that Ray spent on starting this site will be able to reproduce the effort. However, I doubt they can reproduce the hooks into the wiki community as easily or necessarily engender the same sense of ownership. There is a human, collaborative element at work the comments above have largely negelected to incorporate.

Just as a blog post and related public comments about a website provide additional context for the reader, AboutUs accumulates descriptive information in a wiki manner. The main difference is in the way edits are moderated and the idea that wiki content remains editable. There are many edits made each day and we work hard to retain the good changes and revert non-constructive ones. We are at the beginning, and over time, this process will result in a better and better resource.

The money we’ve raised will also go towards development of needed features. Website owners will have more control over their pages and granular information through RSS and e-mail. We are supporting identity initiatives such as OpenID and working within the wiki community on ways to combat spam and vandalism. And yes, among other things, the capitalization algorithm needs works too.

Right now, we’re focused on building a community of editors and a valuable site.

From your messages, I mistakenly assummed that you didn’t want to be a part of the site. Because it is wiki, I simply reverted my changes. http://www.aboutus.org/index.p.....on=history

The website owner at Crisscross.com has elected not to have their AboutUs.org page have information from their website. We apologize that this page is more sparse than other pages on AboutUs.org.

Actually, I did not ask to opt-out. In fact, I opted-in to leave a valid message about Crisscross on AboutUs, telling readers about our relationship with aboutUs, and providing valid links to our About Us and Wikipedia pages. It appears that AboutUs would like to censor anyone who doesn’t agree with their worldview. Not very wiki-like, not very web 2.0 and certainly cause for further alarm.

I have now put the same message on my other sites’ AboutUs pages.

The only gross oversight in your somewhat transparent (though genius, no less) Agent Orange project revolves around the consipucuous absence of monkies. Think of the heightened viral appeal of a site whose AI is marketd as being driven by the behavioral instincts of our primal ancestors. Let me elaborate on what is to come:

Customers are promised Intelligent, Automated product/service recommendations which are driven by certain behavioral patterns of savant monkeys imported from the lush forests of Papua New Guinea

Agent Orange promotes high-return performance-based incentives on the sale of items, whose commissions are actually derived from the latest commerce platform of Commission Junction 7.0 (a new-yet-still-brainless business model in which commissions on products are actually calculated by retarded monkies; merely an ironic coincidence in the broader context of this discussion)

Customers purchase said products, generating prositive emotional rewards from the dual perceptions that nature and science have been granted an opportunity to work together to determine ideal human spending patterns, and from the sense of bio-socio-economic superiority stemming from the belief that primates have served their masters, fulfilling jobs that not even indian outsourcing firm 1.0 employees would have taken.

Viral appeal 11.0 ensues: Discussion among customers of this new bio-tech eCommerce hybridization platform soars, largely supported by the new greentooth-supported mental-telepathy v1.2 standard (this standard hasn’t evolved quite as quickly as the others given the continuing inability of the handset and device manufactuers and wireless carriers to collaborate on any project which might favor consumers and lend to superior product-enhancement in any effective manner.)

So many consumers wind up supporting Agent Orange that the platform dramatically enhances the rate at which society consumes essential and non-essential goods. The result is a rapid acceleration in the stipping of Earth’s natural resources.

The actual monkeys inhabiting the lush forests of Papua New Guinea, and elsewhere, are forced to compete more aggressively for nurishment and shelter in what used to be a plentiful, sustainable eco-system, but is now a desolate, consumer-ravaged graveyard of deforestation and enviro-vaccuousness. In their pursuits, and out of desparation, need, and Darwinism 2.3 (the new standard which finally takes into account the rate of accelleration in species evolution resulting from the 3 core, universal technologies: blackberry, ipod, and roomba) the monkeys become much smarter than ever before. They evolve, ushering a new era we come to know as Monkeygeist 4.0.

Monkey 4.0 is crude by comparison to its decendant Monkey 6.2, which comes to us in the year Google+13,000,000 (no, not google the number, but the impending time reference convention in which all dates are couched in perpectual reference to the creation date of what has become the universal operating system…yes that’s right…the system that actually moderates every natural, planetary, man-made, monkey-made, biological, articificial, any any other force in the universe as we know it, interprets said data, and figures out how to most effectively convince us to go shoe-shopping).

Monkey 6.2 is sufficiently evolved to actually provide the foundation for true artificial intelligence, the once hollow and unlikely promise of an earlier, perhaps less moral Agent Orange. Monkey 6.2 gets employment in Mountainview. The emporer gets his clothing. The universe harmonizes. yada yada… everything is cool until meltdown 7.3, but everyone knows that chapter.

I understand the concept of “fair use” and how it applied to search engines or quotations in articles. But this is not fair use - this is scraped content used as search engine bait.

Joel v 0.63: I don’t think everybody here is a hater. Obviously there are a lot of people who seem to have an irrational emotional attachment to certain companies, but they’re easy to spot. There’s nothing wrong with posting a critical analysis of a company. There are some truly good startups being founded but there are also a lot of obviously flawed startups too. Opinions are like a**holes - everybody has one. If you’ve raised money and launched a company you can’t and shouldn’t listen to every opinion out there, but in a case like this, there are such evident flaws being pointed out by numerous people that you’d hope the company and its investors would take note, unless of course there’s no real goal of building a viable business, which is certainly the case with a lot of startups. TechCrunch can be great for a startup because there’s often a lot of very good feedback being provided absolutely free of charge. Smart founders will consider valid criticisms whild dumb ones will ignore it.

If they get traffic from search engines - it’s great and this could make money.

Anyway - this site (and the discussion above) gives me a nice idea to make some money

==You have come to the wrong place==
Crisscross does not authorize this page. The information on it is likely to be inaccurate and is not to be trusted.

Frankly, we have enough real work to do without correcting errors, misguided attacks, rumors, half-truths and lies, libelous statements, and the uninformed opinions (not to mention the poor grammar and spelling) of assorted trolls, loons, half-wits, cynics, psychos, nutjobs, and/or anyone who has, had, or ever will have a grudge against us, or wants to take out their bad-hair day anger on us. The small (and unproven) gain in traffic is insignificant compared to the hassle.

In other words we will not do free corrections to enrich the investors of aboutus.org. We are happy to make corrections to our Wikipedia page because it is a non-profit organization that has some integrity.

If you want to find more about Crisscross please go to our about us page, our blog, or our Wikipedia page.

If you want to find out about any website, go to the site itself or go to Wikipedia. Do not come back here again.

WEBMASTERS: Please feel free to use this text as a template to show your displeasure.

I agree with a lot of what Drama said. They have no IP. All you need to duplicate this is mediawiki and the ability to spider whois records. It’s a cute idea, one that I’ve toyed with in one form or another for awhile. A place to look up “meta” information and comments about websites. But maybe it’s my limited experience that let’s me see all of the pitfalls with this.

For one, you’re going to have serious comment and moderation problems. Wikipedia already has to deal with edit wars where someone adds text then someone else removes it ad nausuem. What if I go on AboutUs right now and edit their page to say “This company uses copyrighted text, etc etc”. Then the same people they have posting on this thread will change it. Then I’ll change it back. And that’s just going to keep going until a user never knows what content he or she will see.

Wikipedia utilizes a LOT of editors/admins who work for free because they get so much value out of wikipedia (and because of the little power trip they get from being able to zap people’s edits). I don’t think AboutUs will be able to get that many people onboard to help them deal with spam/vandalism and most importantly flame wars.

Copyrighted text is a minor issue. Most people don’t care. What I want as a business owner is a chance to defend myself from possibly unfair criticism. What if someone misunderstands my terms of service and I have to kill their account or some such and then they go on AboutUs saying horrible things about my company? Then I have to go and explain that no, we aren’t evil but the customer just blah blah blah, or just delete the comments alltogether. It’s just going to be a pain.

I suggest you look into a company called “ThirdVoice”. You can find them on a google search. They went out of business during the original bubble. They were a system for commenting on various websites, discussion and community etc based on a site. Problem was site owners hated them for the reasons listed above. Users weren’t that into posting. I think AboutUs will have a lot of the same problems.

VCMike - I honestly don’t care about the copyright issues - to me there are much bigger issues.

And while this could become a Zagat type site, at the same time, this come become something much worse. I want to know where the traffic is coming from. I wonder how much of it is from general web users looking for an about us page being steered in the wrong direction.

This type of site (if anything) should complement my about us page, not steal from it.