Thank you!

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.abou...;action=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.