Biographicon Wants To Be Wikipedia For The Non-Notable Masses

Pownce look n feel.

I need to understand something…

one…how and why are these sites backed by real companies (ceo, cto, etc).

two…why would anyone invest in them

three..why would anyone need to invest in them

four..how do any of these thousands of stupid sites make money

and just to add..i could develop a site like this over an afternoon…

Without being able to get hold of any more information than the article describes, this prospect looks plain terrifying. There are serious disputes raging surrounding Wikipedia and privacy issues. The lack of accountability, and the nightmarish scenario of anonymous people defaming others at will, is out of control at that site. Subjects are trying to get themselves off the site in droves.

If these Biographicon people allow anyone to edit any content on any other living person without any regulation, then they should be prepared for a war which they will ultimately lose. But it will be very bitter indeed.

mike - I won’t address all of your questions…and it would likely take you more than an afternoon to create a site like this, but remember that digg is a fairly simple thing to code, to. As was youtube, which uses Adobe’s Flash for all the hard parts. It’s about creating something first, or executing best first, that resonates with people. The network effect kicks into gear, and it becomes largely unstoppable (but, see Friendster). Is this that kind of application? I’d say no right now. But I also said that about reddit when it launched, another ycombinator startup that had a nice payday and has distinguished itself sufficiently from digg to have a fairly large audience.

Remember too that YCombinator only puts a tiny amount of cash in these startups to get them off the ground.

They’re! They’re doing!

Their company is doing fine.

They’re (they are) doing fine.

Jesus H. Christ.

Michael - they have guidelines here:

http://www.biographicon.com/guidelines

but i agree, enforcement is a serious pain, and it has potential liability.

Dexter - I fixed the typo. Are you going to be ok?

Yes, I think. We’ll get through this… and then we can try to move on with our lives.

Funky, anyone can be considered significant now and write his bio.

Hard to get behind something which looks and feels like a slightly modified mediawiki install.

Is this funded by YC? Looks like another fail.

YC summer 2007? No way this site took this long to develop.. my guess is you had this one queued for a while waiting for a slow news weekend..?

Smooth execution, super easy to add useful information, I like it!

Looks cool. Its really easy to create a page. Love he use of ajax and the connections.

Got a lot of competition but i can see this becoming the wikipediia for people. Also loving the design.

I don’t see this as a business really. it’s more like a hobbie or a project with no solid end result in sight. (lets put it together and see what happens). that is apparently the trend these days. just get something online, doesn’t matter what it is.

I give them credit for putting something together and testing to see if it works, but to be honest it’s a shit idea. it’s not even an idea, it’s really a spin off. Where is the damn excitement? i don’t mean to rip just these guys.. but it’s across the board these days.

I’m still waiting for a revolutionary product to surface in this over populated crowd of shit

Ethan from Biographicon here. Thanks for all your comments.

@Steve - Yep, that’s the idea.
@Brian - Glad you like it!
@John Sing - We sweated those features. Good to hear that it paid off. And yes, there is competition in this space, but we’re excited about the situation. There’s competition because it’s valuable territory.

I took a look at the guidelines, which were woefully inadequate. There seems to be no provision for accountability. No mention of how the site is going to vet contributors, or whether contributors will be allowed to write “biographies” of private people from a position of total anonymity. It reads like a stalking and harassment timebomb. Wikipedia is a mess of problems now, with defamation plaguing public or semi-notable people every single day. Whereas this site appears to want to target private individuals, which in light of the spiraling antagonism surrounding Wikipedia, beggars belief.

The growing movement of online accountability advocates will be watching this site, and others like it very closely. Reform of Section 230 is becoming an imperative. But until that day comes, people setting up sites like this better know what they’re getting themselves into, as it can turn into a nasty business very quickly and veer out of their control very easily.

Andrew Keen makes good points in todays LA Times
http://www.latimes.com/news/op.....7294.story

This is Ethan of the Biographicon.

Hi Michael - Thanks for bringing up some important points. You mention Section 230 (for others reading this, this grants protections to operators of web sites regarding user created content). However, we have no intention of leaving any malicious content on the site, legal protections or no. We have a strict ’shoot on sight’ policy for that, and direct our users to enforce this, too. We do this, first of all, because the idea of someone harming someone else on our site is horrifying to us. Our desire to avoid harming people is our first thought here. It’s more than a strictly legal matter for us.

Thanks again for your thoughts.

Mike, you’ve got 3 new cute friends. Check out your profile.

Ethan, please, ban search engines from crawling your site until you address privacy and accountability. I don’t care much personally - there are hundreds of pages about me on the web, but there will be people with not so much exposure and their defaced profiles will come up in searches, end up cached and cause unnecessary distress. No good.

Otherwise I enjoyed adding friends to Mike’s profile, which by the way, was defaced when I first hit his page.

Speaking as a Wikipedian who’s been well in the thick of the living biography controversies on Wikipedia, I can only wish them luck … the reason why we’re as hard-arsed as we are about living biographies is that we can’t take the time to get something imperfect right, they have to be at least okay at all times because bad information can cause real problems for the subjects. Living bios are our biggest ongoing problem. We got harsh on them around the time of the Siegenthaler f*ckup, and wrote Wikipedia:Biographies of living persons. We’re not perfect on this, but we do try very bloody hard indeed. Biographicon will I predict have to try at least as hard.

Michael I wish techcrunch articles were wiki-based just so I could amend this line:

“But like all Y Combinator startups it’s used just a tiny amount of capital to get to launch.”

to

“But like all Y Combinator startups it’s used just a tiny amount of capital to get to launch and has no revenue model”

Seriously. I hate to be a naysayer but Y Combinator makes it so easy and delicious. What kind of traction is a site full of pages about Joe Nobody going to get? The only people who might get views on their pages are the kind of people who probably already have - or are eligible for - a wikipedia page anyway. And for the rest of us there is LinkedIn, Facebook and about a million other sites where we can manage all that boring data about ourselves that no one actually wants to read. I can understand this just being some dude’s bedroom project for fun - but a funded product?

One of the really saddening things though - I took a look at a couple of the profiles of famous people and the “overview” section of each page seems to have been scraped directly from Wikipedia. That’s not cool at all. Totally destroys any shred of credibility this site might have had in my eyes. No mention of the GNU license either, which wikipedia stipulates you must include if you use their content like this.

:/

What’s the point of this site?

To let Joe Q. Nobody see his name on a website so that he can feel he is Really Somebody? (Maybe not quite enough of a Somebody to pay Godaddy $8.95 for a domain for his own website, maybe not bright enough to learn or copy some basic HTML to build his own website…..)

If so, a listing on Biographicon means “This person is totally insignificant (and reading about him/her is a CWOT)”.

What a pathetic idea.

Y-Combinator is brilliant. Paul Graham gets a 6% stake in a bunch of retarded Web 2.0 startups for peanuts. The great thing is he only needs 1 in 100 to work. He’s even better off than a VC.

1. scrape wikipedia
2. save to text files
3. serve online
4. …
5. profit!

This is Ethan from the Biographicon.

@yongfook - For each biography we pulled from Wikipedia (some 100,000), the archive page indicates its origin and links to the GNU license you mention. For example: http://www.biographicon.com/hi.....Steve_Jobs

@25, why would I click “Archive” to view a license? Why not just put it under “License” or with the biography itself? Muddying the route to the info just makes it seem like you’re trying to hide it away and make the content appear as your own, at least to me :/

With Wikipedia covering the totality of all coverable subjects… who needs to create an information repository ever again?

This has been done and failed. Check out wikiyou.com. It had a somewhat notable founder and a whole lot more money than this site. It also had a better name. I’m losing faith in YC. Their only somewhat success has been a digg clone. Why don’t they fund me!?

@Ethan

So, what does “copyright 2008″ refer to?

It’s Seigenthaler. I wanted to let you know before Dexter went crazy.

@22 Nick, get out of you ivory tower..most people dont know html and have no desire to learn it

..if one thinks about why sites like Facebook, Myspace et al are so popular it’s more than just social connections but rather public recognition. A lot of people want their lives to mean something and to show others that they matter and are unique in some way.

This site has the potential to take off as it’s a more buttoned down version of either FB or MS but less formal than linkedin.

lol…”for the non-noteable masses”

god, you sound smug

Yes, sounds exacxtly the same as WikiYou.com

You’re breaking the GFDL. You should really not create a site like this when you can’t even understand a basic license like that.

This libel-magnet will fail by the end of this year.

A better model is something like MyWikiBiz.com, which also purports to be a “Wikipedia for the non-notable”. However, the big difference is this — no community editing of articles about legal entities and persons. Those pages are reserved to be edited only by an agent, representative, or the person themselves. Accountability is managed by a registered e-mail address before being allowed to edit.

Those who which to make social-crowd based edits may do so on any topic that isn’t a legal entity.

Section 230 will not protect Biographicon once it reaches the point of being an “attractive nuisance”.

For more about MyWikiBiz, see this press release:

http://www.sbwire.com/news/view/15726

Biographicon’s got a gorgeous design and it’s lightning fast to use, far more pleasant than wikiyou (which doesn’t even list Michael Jackson?!).

Doing anything that revolves around crowd-activity is necessarily playing with fire and there’s no way that all the parameters will be tweaked just right straight out of the gate.

Non-notable biographies (i.e. those about people you actually know) are far more relevant to most people than celebs and great to see. I’m friends with Ethan and Daniel and know that they’ve done everything they can to make the site easy and pleasant to use as well as compelling enough that people would bother doing so in the first place.

Motivating and managing crowds is a really hard problem but mass-biographies are a really interesting space and it’s great that two such upstanding guys are tackling it.

Mr. Arrington, thank you for the reply. Sorry if I sounded a bit rude, I’ve just been confused after reading about this sort of scenario over and over again. You made some good points as usual.

The site says that Osama Bin Laden is George W. Bush’s brother. I guess it’s not far from the truth, now that I think about it.

I like it. It was smooth and quick and I liked the whole thing of how people are linked. I am just a regular sort and check the web for fun stuff and this is fun and easy. The real question is are we just all eight degrees apart?

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