Top 5 things I would do if I were in charge of Wikipedia
Hypothesizing about a probable Wikipedia Educational Foundation, during a break from his busy schedule (yeah, right), my good friend
Jayanta Bhattacharya listed out five things that he would do if God (Or, some rich person with tonnes of hard cash lying around - Jonty mentions that Anil Ambani might be a good fit) intervened, buying out Wikiepdia, and conveniently putting my fantasy-prone albeit highly- learned friend in charge.
A small Todo list that emerged from our talks:1. Allow every single person to make their personal pages in Wikipedia along with their achievements (or non- achievements) in life.
2. They will be charged a 5-dollar entry fee. That money would go towards the funding of schools in poor countries.
3. Bring out hard copies of Wikipedia to distribute amongst poor populations.
4. Allow sponsorships by the way of banners etc for a premium from companies. (no Google Adsense) and then use the money for purely benevolent purposes, primarily on education - education is empowerment.
5. If there is a lot of money in the coffers, Jonty would like to start the
Wikipedia Educational Foundation, opening schools and knowledge centers around the world, running educational satellite channels etc. The education would be free and the schools will not be affiliated to any boards but a central
WEF board.
This way, general education around the world would be of the same standard, but different countries would have different history, civic and law syllabus.
Bonus: And make Wikipedia the primary search engine on the Internet.
What would you do if you were in charge of Wikipedia?Labels: education, google, User generated Content, wiki, wikipedia
News sites vs. Blogs vs. Wikis
The story goes like this: pioneering bloggers Dave Winer and Rogers Cadenhead made a
long bet with Martin Nisenholtz, the senior VP for digital operations at the New York Times.
The bet was:
"In a Google search of five keywords or phrases representing the top five news stories of 2007, weblogs will rank higher than the New York Times' Web site."
As 2007 draws to a close, Cadenhead does a
count and finds out that
blogs beat the Times in Google results.
However,
Wikipedia beat both Blogs and News Sites on four of the top five news stories.
- Would love to see a comparison of technology stories rankings for blogs, news sites and Wikipedia, but do people go to Google News for tech stories?
- Would also love to see an annual rating of tech stories on MSM vs. Blogs.Some bloggers are light years ahead in terms of doing tech analytical pieces but that is just an opinion.
Labels: blogging, new media, wiki
Is Google going Microsoft’s way?
Through two almost successive product announcements, Google has started to convince me that it may be going Microsoft’s way. Microsoft used its dominance in the Desktop OS and Office business to clone existing successful programs with great success in the 90s, destroying many startups in the process.
Google is doing the same things but I suspect Google’s ability to defeat the incumbents with two upcoming services.
First, Google announces a Wikipedia-type system called
“Knol” where people can write encyclopedia type pieces and share ad revenues with Google, benefiting from Google’s easy indexing promise.
About.com, ehow.com, wikihow.com, squidoo.com, hubpages, mahalo.com, howstuffworks.com…these are some of the heavy weights that Google aims to defeat just because it enjoys 70% dominance in the search business.
Earlier Google launched base.google.com to challenge Craigslist, pages.google.com to challenge easy web page creators. What happened to all these?
Then there is the trust thing. Will Google go Yahoo’s way and show links from only its properties as top results. That is easiest way to lose credibility in the market.
Coming on to the second announcement of Google introducing a
redesigned version of the long dead Google Answers, where it will most probably show results from Google search. If this is the case, the new service can be as vague as some Yahoo Answers replies can be. At least the original Google answers had people who gave detailed, researched replies for a fee.
Suggestion for Google: Combine the above two services and create an army of 10000 people (when it died, Google Answers only had 800 people answering questions) who are willing to search on demand and try to create a better service than existing human-powered search services, including chacha.com.Labels: google, knol, Microsoft, search, web 2.0, web strategy, wiki
How Jimmy Wales intends to earn money from Wikipedia
His plan is simple: do all you can to put Wikia.com on the map.
Think of Wikia.com as the ad-supported, ad sharing version of Wikipedia.
Wikipedia’s decision in January to include the nofollow tag with all outbound links from Wikipedia was controversial, to say the least.
However,
Techcrunch reports that the
nofollow tag is not applied to
inter-wiki links , including links to
Wikia , which is Wikipedia’s for-profit offshoot. This
'linking hypocricy' ensures that all of Wikipedia's valuable
link juice goes to no one but Wikia.com, giving boost to Wikia's search engine rankings.
In January, Techcrunch reported that Wikia.com’s traffic is on the up, producing 2.5 million page views per day.
Wikia launched
OpenServing last December, which gives free web hosting to wiki developer who are free to put up their own ads – a wiiki version of blogspot.com
Wikia has launched 5‘open source’ magazines on travel, politics, gadgets and entertainment and gaming.
A Wikia search engine is also in the works.
Labels: wiki
