Wikio Launches Digg-Like Site For U.S., Germany, And Spain
Natali Del Conte
36 comments »
Wikio, a user-contributed news company, launched Wikio.com, Wikio.de, and Wikio.es at the LeWeb3 conference in Paris today. The three new sites are aimed at the US, Germany, and Spain, respectively.
Wikio has been live in France and Italy for a few months. They have 600,000 French users and 100,000 Italian users.
In April, TechCrunch France writer Ouriel Ohayon reviewed Wikio and found it to be a very comprehensive news generating site. Ohayon became a shareholder in the company after reviewing the site. TechCrunch U.S., however, has no financial affiliation with Wikio.
Wikio is a hybrid between user-added and editorial-added news and blogs. They have an editorial staff that ranks and contributes stories but they also allow users to add and rank stories, much like Digg. User voting is balanced with editorial voting and stories are ranked accordingly. Pierre Chappaz, founder of Wikio, developed the site based on his belief that Europe needed a Digg of its own.
“Wikio is the first service of its kind in Europe,” Chappaz said. “Europe is very different than the U.S. In the U.S., you have a large diversity of information services but in Europe, we only have Google News and to a certain extent, Yahoo News. If you look at Technorati, their index is far from being comprehensive. So Wikio is to establish new information in Europe coming from blogs as well as traditional media because we don’t see any reason to put a wall between blogs and traditional media.”
Chappaz said that Wikio.com was developed for the “English-speaking” population, although a UK-version of the site is Wikio’s next project, which will index British media.
“Obviously Wikio.com’s largest market is the U.S. and I would be delighted if Wikio takes a large market share in the U.S. but our main focus is still Europe,” Chappaz said.
One of the main barriers to Wikio becoming a true pan-European service is that there is little interoperability between the countries. You can link to stories from other countries’ Wikio sites, but there is no translation service. Each country has a different ranking algorithm for its stories based on the most popular news sources within that country. So you can search each country individually for news, but you can’t search for global activity.
“It’s difficult because there is a language issue. What we will offer in Wikio in the future is a possibility to search Wikio in all countries but you still have to understand the local language,” Chappaz said.
Ahhhh!!
So much crap to read… Who has time to do anything else? We read hundreds of blogs each day, refresh Digg a hundred times or so, publish ourselves, check MySpace and the likes a ton of time… What the heck…
Darn, I still did not make it to number 1 commentator. I am surprised that Europe needs “a digg of its own”, 2 yrs after digg.com was founded? In China, there are probably at least 10 popular digg services. Europe has a lot to catch up when it comes to replication
However, European countries do have better innovation, just look at Skype.
Shouldn’t be a surprise, Grant. Localization and local content could be the next big opportunity. There is a big world outside of US that is not being catered to properly by “US centric” sites.
Sweet, my three favorite countries.
|-O
In April, TechCrunch France writer Ouriel Ohayon reviewed Wikio and found it to be a very comprehensive news generating site. Ohayon became a shareholder in the company after reviewing the site. TechCrunch U.S., however, has no financial affiliation with Wikio.
Can you disclose more about this? He became a shareholder “after reviewing the site”, was it quid-pro-quo? He is still on the TechCrunch payroll, no? Did he contribute to this report? Who is reporting from LeWeb3 if not Ouriel?
Readers, be careful what you read, especially when even the ‘disclaimer’ sounds slightly shady.
I’d like to see what Wikio.es has in mind to compete with Meneame.net (+/- 1,000 in Alexa) and tec.fresqui.com in Spain/Spanish.
There are even subject-specific Meneame clones (literally, Meneame is open source) that are doing quite good among the Spanish speaking population. Room for somone coming late in the game? Maybe. We’ll see… It won’t be easy. IMHO I don’t know if “Europe” needs a “Digg of its own”, but the Spanish world already has one, and a fwe bunch competing for #2.
Pretty cool. Always looking for new social news sites.
Ouriel learned about Wikio as part of his writing and was so impressed he decided to invest. He forwarded the news to me last week, under embargo, and instructed that I be crystal clear about the fact that he is now a shareholder. I have no stake in this company whatsoever. Ouriel did not brief me on the news, nor did he have any editorial review on this story. He did not even see an advance draft. Thank you for asking for more clarification before jumping to conclusions. I’m happy to answer any further questions you might have.
Innovative and with a lot of personalized content -try it and see!
“Wikio is the first service of its kind in Europe” - that is not really true now is it. Just in Sweden there are a number of such sites (3 based on Pligg), for example farskpressad.se. Just because you are the first European Digg-ish site that gets written about in TechCrunch doesnt mean that you are the only one. Also, Europe is quite a bit bigger than just Germany, France and the UK.
I agree with Andreas. I know a German called Webnews.de
Wikio is not alone out there…
about time
Yet another sponsored post, with basically no disclaimer. TC .fr and TC .us are associated, even if it is in name only.
I mean think about it, a writer on another TC site sends in news, gets preferential treatment and the only disclaimer is that Wikia has no fiduciary resp. with TC .us.
Get with the game people.
BTW, Natali if Ouriel forwarded you the news, then yes, he did brief you.
Scoopeo is a pretty cool French Digg-a-like I’ve been visiting for a while. Just for reference.
Hmm…been trying to register for 2 days with 2 different browsers…and no luck. One might think that they would fix things like this before coming out at a major conference.
-Chris
In Germany there is alsow yigg.de as well. Which used to be digg.de until they (obviously) got in trouble with digg.com. It’s pretty featurepacked (which is good and bad in some circumstances).
Does anyone know there to find more informations on how they (wikio) count the votes? I really doubt the numbers on the german site. The site just launched and a new submission gets 30 votes within the first 15 minutes? I highly doubt that.
I can’t find anything about that in the faqs (or anythere else).
The idea seems interesting, it’s a mix between technorati & google news & pageflakes.
That looks pretty cool. We don t have technorati (this looks more to techcnorati than digg i would say) in German. Thanks Natali for the discovery.
Neat site. Interesting that Wikio lets you vote without logging in. And no ads, that’s refreshing. I wonder why Wikio is called Wikio if it’s not a Wiki?
The sites still in beta, bugs happen. As mentioned in the posts above,imitation is flattery,anyway digg’s main focus is on tech news, no matter how hard they for it not to be.
The average joe has probably never heard of digg, so its nice to have a focus on on other topics and countries/languages.
I totaly agree with you andreas.. Just because techcrunch hasnt written about anything else in europe doesnt mean its the first.. Like somebody said there is alot of Digg type content out there. there actually is a whole pligg subculture. but i dont think that news is the new thing anymore. the market is gonna evolve next year and just as 2006 can be called as the social network and video BOOM. there are gonna pop up hundreds of new markets and i believe 2007 is gonna be a big year for a evolution of the web world!!
I think the numbers in this article are a little confusing. 600.000 users makes it sound like they have 600.000 registered users. Their German blog states that Wikio.fr has had “600.000 visitors per month” and “27.553 beta testers” ….
Thank you for the post Natali although we do not define Wikio as a “digg-like” . It may look a little bit like Digg because users can also publish and vote on the site but it is very different.
Wikio is a personalized information page which includes a news search engine. To my knowledge it is actually the first european search engine indexing blogs and media. Given the massive development of the european blogosphere we believe that there is a need for a dedicated search engine (specially with advanced personalization features).
I invite you and the readers of this post to try the service and create personalized tabs to see what we mean by personalization. Your feedback is welcome!
>Janko: there is no need to register on Wikio unless you want to publish a post directly or to save your tabs permanently. Wikio launched in France end of June and attracted 600.000 unique users in November. Italy was launched in october and is now on a trend above 100.000 unique users. The private beta test that you are mentionning has been held at the beginning of the year.
> Chris: sorry for the bugg, this should work fine now!
> Marcel: you may have noticed that Wikio is grouping news that are similar. The number of votes that we are displaying for groups on the home page is the total of the votes for the articles included in each group. It appears that the number of articles grouped in german in an average group is significantly higher than in french, you can compare you will see the difference. Thus the total number of votes on the german home page is already high compared with France although Wikio.de has less users than Wikio.fr . As for the recent news that you see here http://www.wikio.de/live we did not detect any problem but if you notice any please let us know you help is greatly appreciated!
Very interesting, I’ll follow the evolution …..
It’s pretty cool,
How can I do if I want to import my opml file ?
I appreciate the mix between personalized pages and search engine.
Yutz
What a crap…. 500 million people are living in Europe. The US has only 290 million, so do you realy think, that we need 2 years for a stupid digg-clon? Halo? Only in Germany we have at least 5…. Do your homework before you copy the pr-text of a new company.