Created: January 15, 2001

Summary:

Wikipedia has been around for over 5 years, is the largest wiki (by far) and serves over 400 million page views per month (to compare, USA Today has about 300 million).

Wikipedia is a free, online, user-written encyclopedia in wiki format that was created in 2001 by Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales. It has grown at an astonishing rate and now includes 1.6 million articles. More than 600,000 of these are in English, more than 250,000 in German, and more than 100,000 each in Japanese and French (wikipedia has editions in 205 languages, 92 of which are active).

Many people don’t realize how easy it is for anyone to add content to wikipedia (I’ve done it several times). Each month, thousands of individuals add content to the project.

We are writing about it today because it became the most comprehensive and most reliable center of knowledge as information became available about the London bombings on July 7. We posted about the attacks here, and noted in last weeks Web 2.0 wrapup that while the BBC and other news sites couldn’t keep up, wikipedia marched along without a hiccup and kept the world informed. Clay Shirky spoke about it, and Jim Phelps picked it up here:

“Whenever there is a really major disaster but no immediate news, the people on cable are often vamping because they have to keep repeating the basic story on the chance that someone has just tuned in even in the absence of any new information. Wikipedia solves that problem while, at the same time, having a symbiotic relationship with those news outlets because it points people to the written form of stories”

See also David Weinberger’s post on this here.

For many of us, we started to fully understand the tremendous power of wikipedia as a cultural/knowledge aggregator on July 7, 2005.

What are Wikis?

A Wiki is a web application that allows users to add content, as on an Internet forum, but also allows anyone to edit the content. The first wiki was the Portland Pattern Repository, created on March 25, 1995 by Ward Cunningham.

A defining characteristic of wiki technology is the ease with which pages can be created and updated. Generally, there is no review before modifications are accepted. Wikis generally practice the philosophy of making it easy to correct mistakes, rather than making it difficult to make them.

The name is based on the Hawaiian term wiki wiki, meaning “quick” or “informal”. It is used commonly in Hawaii as part of the Hawaiian Pidgin language.

Link

History of Encyclopedias:

Link

An encyclopedia is a written compendium of knowledge. An excellent summary can be found here, at wikipedia:

“The idea of collecting all of the world’s knowledge within arm’s reach under a single roof goes back to the ancient Library of Alexandria and Pergamon. Many writers of antiquity (such as Aristotle) attempted to write comprehensively about all human knowledge.”

“Traditional encyclopedias are written by a number of employed text writers, usually people with an academic degree.”

Today, most encyclopedias offer content online and charge a subscription fee for content ranging up to about $100 per year.

How is Wikipedia different (and better)?

Wikipedia combines wikis, which are aggregations of content created by users, and the idea of an encyclopedia. To summarize it further would be foolish – we cannot compete with tens of thousands of editors at wikipedia. See their entry for wikipedia here.

At its core, wikipedia offers conent on a vast array of subjects (like web 2.0), and offers additional features such as a discussion forum for each item, editing tools to add content, and a page showing historical revisions to the text.

Samuel Klein writes a beautiful post summarizing our thoughts exactly on what Wikipedia is, was and will become here.

There are certainly problems with wikipedia, but these problems are inherent in the structure of wikis (when everyone can write, some people write crap). But it is tremendously resilient and self-healing, and an extremely important asset to the Internet culture.

Creators:

Larry Sanger (left the project in 2002)
Jimmy Wales

Relevant Links:

TheNetReport – interview with Jimmy Wales (full interview here)
David Weinberger (on the London bombings)
obaeyens (scientist discovered wikipedia, wants to expand on his area of exprtise)
Wired Magazine article on Wikipedia
See Nivi – “Wikipedia Defeats Google (Sometimes)”

Tags: wikipedia, london, londonbombings, encyclopedia, wiki, wikis, techcrunch, web2.0

Launched: about two weeks ago

What is it?

Planet Web 2.0 is a website (and more importantly an RSS feed) that aggregates content from web 2.0 publishers around the web. It’s a must add feed for anyone tracking web 2.0. The sources of the content are linked on the sidebar, and include TechCrunch.

We first discovered the site while reading Richard MacManus’ excellent and much discussed post “On Bots and Content Creation / Aggregation” last week.

We have lots of thoughts on Richard’s post (and generally, entirely agree with him). Our feeling is Planet Web 2.0, which goes out of its way to attribute content, is going about this inevitable evolution in the right way, and we support them.

The debate on the issue of re-publishing content goes back as far as the web itself. RSS makes it even easier, of course. In fact, the entire purpose of RSS is the republishing of content. The debate centers on whether it should be republished only in RSS readers, or if it can be republished anywhere. In reality, though, what is the difference between an online RSS reader and a website? Not much, particuarly when you think about how bloglines and other readers allow sharing of feeds…

Editor’s Note: To track the “old” debate on RSS and copyright, see Jason Calcanis, Robert Scoble, and Makeyougohmm to start.

So here’s TechCrunch’s position: We like Planet Web 2.0 and think what is doing is a responsible way to promote content, while giving proper attribution to those who wrote it.

In forming our position, we noted Ian Davis’s (the creator of Planet Web 2.0) comments on Richard’s post:

“I think you’re uncovering some essential quality of content remixing that perhaps hasn’t been appreciated before. Aggregating and remixing content needs to be done with respect. We should respect the original author’s intent and also the time and effort they put into creating the content. Repurposing, passing off, non-attribution – these are all disrespectful ways to treat content and people. Hopefully I’m treating the writers with respect on Planet Web 2.0 (and other similar sites I host). Perhaps a little bit more traffic will flow to them or perhaps it’ll help people discover related writers to those they already know. Either way I appreciate the work that goes into the writing and only wish I could write half as well as those I read.”
Link

As long as this his position, and his actions reflect his position, we’re behind him all the way.

On a related note, Nivi (another must read blog) created two aggregate feeds recently – the Venture Capital Channel and the Entrepreneur Channel. He does less attribution than Planet Web 2.0, but it’s clear that his motives are pure. We recommend both.

Planet Web 2.0 Creator:

Ian Davis

Update: I spoke with Ian Davis by email and he provided the following insights on his site:

“My motivation for setting up PW was to collect together the writings of
people I respect in this space. I wanted to understand the Web 2.0
landscape and keep abreast of new developments and applications. I
already had a small private subscription list but rather than keep keep
it to myself I decided to publish and aggregate from it. I reasoned that
if I was interested in this then there were bound to be others equally
interested. Hopefully people will come across it via people they already
read and discover other great writers. The site has only been active for
a couple of weeks – I think I registered it on the 1st July.

I’m having a lot of fun. It feels like I’ve just discovered Mosaic for
the first time ”

Update: There have been a couple of posts that are related to the subject of content stealing/aggregation. This first is by Fred Wilson and he calls it the “internet Access of Evil” and he quotes a Jason Calcanis email. The second is by Michael Parekh, who noticed the same site stole his content.

There is a line here, and some people choose to cross it. Really bad form.

Tags: rss, copyright, planetweb2.0, techcrunch, web2.0, content

Previous Profile: June 18, 2005

Digg 2.0 Launched: 5 hours ago (July 10, 2005)

What is it?

See our previous profile on Digg for a description of its functionality. Its a very useful news site that leverages user submissions and “diggs” of stories to promote content higher in various categories and the home page.

Digg released version 2.0 a few hours ago. New look and feel and expanded functionality.

In their own words, “Tons of new features, and a few bugs too Please submit any bugs you find by clicking on “report a website bug” in the lower right hand corner. We will do our best to get them fixed as soon as possible. Thanks and enjoy! (note: minimalist design coming in v2.1)�” Link

One nice feature we’ve noticed is the ability to add Digg stories to your own homepage – cool widget. Link

Links:

Digg
Welcome to Digg 2.0
Xtremdav45’s Blog
Grevs Dev Blog
Jaredm
Krenken.com
Eric’s blog
Phoenixrealm
Jake Jarvis (great post) (note Jake’s bio)

Tags: digg, digg2.0, slashdot, web2.0, news, tags, tagging, techcrunch, web2.0

Previous Profile: June 16, 2005

What’s new?

Josh Schachter (the creator of del.icio.us) announced new “tags for two” functionality yesterday. It allows direct bookmarket notification to a person, to suggest they see specific content.

We first noticed a trend towards people using del.icio.us as a recommendation engine about a month ago. Fred Wilson, in addition to being THE web2.0 venture capitalist, loves music and posts regularly on music he is listening to. On June 4, 2005 he posted a request to his readers to recommend new music to him via del.icio.us:

“If you find an mp3 file with its own URL, like my MP3 of the Week, simply tag it in delicious with a tag that is clearly your own. For example, I use “fred’spodcast” as my tag. Feel free to tag mp3s with that tag if you want me to listen to them.

Then you take the RSS feed for that delicious tag, in my case http://del.icio.us/rss/tag/fred’spodcast, and burn that as a Feedburner feed.”

We noticed it, and sort of put it in the back of our mind filed under “another cool del.icio.us tool”.

Fred also set up a del.icio.us tag for his wife, Joanne. Whenever he wants her to see something on the web, he tags it “for:gothamgal”.

Brad Feld noticed this, and liked it, and posted here that he set up something similar for himself – “If you run across something on the web you want me to see, just tag it.”

All of this got Josh Schachter’s attention and so he created a more structured, and private, way of doing this:

“tags for two

You can see items tagged for you at http://del.icio.us/for/ (it’ll redirect to your own page, which other users will not be able to see.)”
Link

Brad Feld then posted an update to his original request here.

So, bottom line, any delicious user can now have a private recommendation tag. To recommend stuff to me, tag it “for:marrington” and I will be able to view it at ” http://del.icio.us/for/marrington” (although this will not be public).

It’s a nice feature, although I would like an option to make it public. I think it would be interesting to share these recommendations with everyone. There are also concerns being expressed about spamming incentives. Over time, I can see “blacklists” being created for “bad users”, although it would be easy for people to simply create new delicious accounts.

Relevant Links:

delicious blog post on this
Brad Feld (#1) (#2)
fred wilson on music recommendations
Jay Knight
Sinceretheory

Tags: Delicious, tagsfortwo, del.icio.us, web2.0, RSS, tags, tagging, web2.0, techcrunch

What is it?

There’s not much on the web about this yet, but Google is apparently looking at the reviews space and has put a very light experiment up on their site. I say “light” because the only product reviews they have up as of today are for Star Wars III.

It looks like the first post on Google Reviews was by Photo Matt in a post dated May 9, 2005. Marc Canter spoke up today on the subject here.

Reviews are a very interesting space. People use their blogs often to review books, movies, music, restaurants, and just about everything else out there that we interact with. It’s an obvious area to aggregate and network.

Bob Wyman (see also structuredblogging) (the CTO of PubSub), has created a structured blogging plugin for Wordpress for reviews (and also events) that is excellent and that I use at my personal blog. And there is also the hReviews initiative. Finally, there is a rudimentary blog review aggregator at blogcritics.org.

Anyway, it is what it is and the space is worth watching. A lot of Google’s moves seem to be placing it squarely in the middle of web 2.0.

Screen Shot:

Relevant Links:

RDF Reviews Post
hReviews