News Blog

That's right, Wikipedia now has 10 million articles. But participation in this global brain-share is restricted in China.

Wikipedia being blocked is news to no one in China, but there's a bit of a catch-22 even for those who use proxies to get around the restrictions: many proxy URLs and anonymizers are banned from editing Wikipedia to reduce vandalism.

When I want to see an article on Wikipedia, I pop it into the Anonymouse Web site, and the content comes right up. But if I see a mistake in an article, I'm unable to make my contribution.

Vandalism on Wikipedia is a serious issue. People turn entire pages into insults directed at their subject. Others insert more insidious misinformation that's hard to detect. The community is generally very good at catching these things, but banning open proxies was seen as a good way to reduce the number of people doing these things with impunity. If you don't want your own IP to get banned for vandalism, maybe you'd use a service that hid your identity.

Tor is perhaps the best known relatively robust anonymizing tool online. The Global Voices Online project promotes it in its guide to anonymous blogging. (It's in English, but not blocked in China.) But Tor nodes, too, are usually blocked for editing.

This means that people in China would have to display exceptional ingenuity to participate in the great compilation of information going on at Wikipedia. Some time ago, I wrote a review of now-Harvard Law School Professor Cass Sunstein's book Infotopia. Sunstein focuses his book on the great potential, and potentially great downfalls, of online information gathering by massive communities.

To his reservations, I add one. By no means am I the first to point this out, but when Wikipedia excludes most Internet users from the most populous country on Earth, it's got a long way to go before its relative robustness in English is matched in Chinese. Of course, the billions of individuals not online around the world are also missing their say.

Here's to 10 million nodes in this emerging body of knowledge, but idealists should be careful to note the limits of the project. I just hope the franchise extends more and more. If nothing else, I have a lot to learn from people who aren't yet participating.

TradeVibes, a site that aggregates information, news, and opinions about start-ups, raised $900,000 in seed funding from a group of angel investors that includes serial technology investor Ron Conway, early Google employee Aydin Senkut, and the Kinsey Hills Group.

Mill River Labs, the company behind TradeVibes, is certainly well-connected, given that its four founders were early employees of PayPal. Conway, who was an early investor in Google and PayPal, will act as an adviser to the company, along with YouTube co-founder Steve Chen and Ariba co-founder Ed Kinsey.

Mountain View, Calif.-based TradeVibes launched its free site in beta test form on Friday in a move to take on major sources of company news such as Dow Jones and Hoover's, as well as rival upstarts KillerStartups.com and TechCrunch. It initially opened its site in November by invitation only while the company was building up a database of about 1,000 start-ups, largely in the field of technology.

David Li, co-founder and CEO, said he expects that the site will eventually include start-ups in other fields, thanks to its open system that lets businesses or individuals add information to the site. "We want to be the Wikipedia for company information. But we've created a structured wiki, so it's easier for people to edit information in the same format," Li said.

TradeVides provides basic information like a company's founders, rivals and funding information, but it also gives people a way to discover start-ups in a given interest area, such as clean tech or social networks. Visitors can comment on or rate a start-up, as well as review news and blogs about the company.

Li said TradeVibes plans to make money initially by selling job listings on a company page. He said he can also envision eventually selling subscriptions to investors for added services such as private social networking, in which they could talk to other fellow investors about potential deals.

Mill River Labs was founded in February 2007 by Li; Peter Chu, who is chief technology officer; and David Kang and Doug Ihde, who are both developers. According to its site, TradeVibes employs five people.

(Credit: Google)

Google Sites was just launched and its target is clear: Microsoft SharePoint. While it has an uphill battle--security and a lack of the complex features that SharePoint has, for example--its biggest problem is that it doesn't connect with the content production tools that most people spend their (enterprise) content-producing lives in:

Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Office.

Of course, Google Sites is free, which will cover a multitude of other problems, especially since Microsoft SharePoint turns out to be amazingly overpriced for a Microsoft product. Microsoft has, according to CMS Wire's analysis, completely priced the SME market out of SharePoint.

Last night on the official Google blog, Udi Manber, vice president of engineering, announced that Google is testing a publishing platform called Knol.

It's being compared to Wikipedia and Mahalo. While it's a somewhat different take on knowledge collection, these comparisons are apt.

From what we know so far, Knol is a wiki-like platform. Authors can create topics, and there are tools to interlink articles and content, but as Manber says, an article, or "knol," is "just a Web page." Where it differs from a wiki is its focus on the author. All knols will highlight who wrote them.

Knol should make it easy to create nicely formatted reference pages.

(Credit: Google)

That small difference becomes dramatic when you put Knol alongside Wikipedia. Wikipedia is a collaborative system. There is no author listed on a wiki page because a page may have many authors (if you want to, you can divine who said what on the history pages).

Since Knol pages will be authored, users won't, presumably, be able to dive in and edit another page. They'll be able to submit edits to the author for approval, though. So much for open collaboration. But as a platform for authors who might want to make some money from their work, it's a better bet (Knol will allow authors to monetize their pages as they see fit).

Purists may think that since Google is in the business of monetizing content via advertising, it should not compete with other publishing platforms. However, this is not the first time that Google has gotten into this business.

Blogger, of course, is Google's biggest success in text-publishing platforms. But Google also experimented with its own database, Google Base, in which it not only indexes the information but also stores it. And then there's YouTube.

I would compare Knol to Blogger, and eventually, I think it will have Digg-like elements. Knol is like Blogger because it's a personal publishing platform. It's all about giving authors a platform for writing. It's just a like a blog, but much more structured. If you like a Knoller, you'll likely want to read more written by that person, or even subscribe to his work.

It could become Digg-like, in that multiple Knol pages on the same topic will compete with each other. And while the Manber's post hinted that the arbiter of Knol quality will be Google search rankings, I cannot imagine that there won't, at some point, be both a social network of Knol users and a main page that ranks the most popular Knol pages by votes, page views, discussion flow, or other group metrics.

At this point, based only on the official blog post, Knol looks like a solid end-user publishing platform. I strongly doubt that it will put much of a hurt on Wikipedia, since its author focus makes it much the antithesis of the open, community-driven wiki model. Knol looks more like a Google version of About.com, Mahalo, or Squidoo.

No word on when--or if--Knol will be released to the public.

See also: Google develops Wikipedia rival on News.com. If you're interested in this story, I recommend that you read the official Google post as well as Danny Sullivan's post on Search Engine Land.

The Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit parent company of Wikipedia and its anyone-can-edit brethren, announced on Monday that it has begun its annual fund-raiser. The organization has said that proceeds from the fund-raiser, which runs through December 22, will be used to pay for technological and corporate improvements as well as program development--specifically expanding its operations to global regions and languages that are currently underrepresented.

"We believe that everyone in the world should have access to education, regardless of race, nationality, gender, age or economic background," Wikimedia Foundation founder Jimmy Wales, who also started a for-profit spin-off, Wikia, said in a statement. "We also believe that everyone has knowledge to contribute. Through the public's support and the Foundation's continued efforts, we expect to have a similar impact on communities in the most remote areas of the world as we have in more developed parts of the globe."

For example, the Wikimedia Foundation--which recently relocated from St. Petersburg, Fla., to San Francisco--will hold an event in South Africa in November with the aim to expand Wikipedia's reach among African languages.

Exact data from last year's Wikimedia Foundation fund-raiser is not yet available because the organization does not expect its audit for the 2006-2007 fiscal year to be finished until late November. The Wikimedia Foundation is not announcing a target for this year's fund-raiser but has stated that its 2007-2008 operating budget is $4.6 million.

Several signs are pointing to the imminent launch of Google Wiki and the company's long-awaited presentation service at this week's Office 2.0 conference in San Francisco.

The biggest indicators are history and vague comments by Google officials. Last year's Office 2.0 brought the launch of Google Docs and Spreadsheets, and Jonathan Rochelle, the product manager for Google Spreadsheets, will also be at hand for the opening panel at the conference kickoff on Thursday. Between this, an almost-demo by Google's CEO Eric Schmidt of the presentation application, as well as a post on the Official Google Blog that presentations would be making their way to everyone "this summer," and we should be seeing something new as early as Thursday.

The new wiki application from Google would fill out its online office suite, and give Google Apps a little more appeal for small- and mid-size business customers who want a consolidated wiki solution. The launch would also coincide with the anniversary of Google's acquisition of wiki service JotSpot (review) last October. Considering JotSpot served up multiple tiers of service to serve casual to business users, the model could follow suit with Google's four flavors of Google Apps, including their business and enterprise solutions.

However, the trail of clues about how these services will tie into Google's existing online office environment is thin. There have been few signs of Google's presentation service making an early appearance since the acquisition of Zenter and Tonic Systems a few months ago. From the outside, the clearest indicator has been the move of Jotspot's user help and forums services over to Google's own native support network.

Stay tuned.

BOSTON--When it comes to using Web 2.0 technologies in businesses, Microsoft is officially onboard.

Microsoft's general manager of SharePoint tools and platforms, Derek Burney, gave a talk at the Enterprise 2.0 conference here, where he announced a Web 2.0-style add-on called Community Kit for SharePoint.

Also, enterprise RSS vendor NewsGator announced that it has enhanced SharePoint's feed subscribing tools with tagging and an Ajax interface.

The notion of integrating Web 2.0 technologies from the public Internet--blogs, wikis, and social networking features--in businesses has been gaining momentum for the past few years and is sometimes referred to as "enterprise 2.0."

Several smaller software companies, like SocialText and Jive Software, have created products designed to be lightweight, user-friendly alternatives to traditional content management and collaboration tools.

Large software vendors have gotten on the bandwagon as well. IBM within a month is releasing a series of tools, such as Lotus Connections, which provides blogs and bookmarking tools for business users.

Microsoft's Burney on Tuesday said Microsoft already has built-in support for blogs and wikis into the SharePoint portal server. It also has a tool called MySite that allows business workers to create an individual profile page with details on themselves and their work projects.

The Community Kit for SharePoint is meant to enhance what's already in there, according to Microsoft's SharePoint blog. It includes templates for enhancing a blog's look, better wiki tools, and a tag cloud feature

The product was spearheaded and built by a group of about 20 volunteers and released on Microsoft's code-sharing site, CodePlex.

Burney said that Web 2.0 technologies in business shine for exactly this sort of task, where businesses can use the Internet to solicit opinions and feedback from customers to improve product development.

"It's great because the product can grow outside of its release cycle," he said.

The company also hosts several mashup meetings a month where representatives from different product groups at Microsoft get together to compare notes. These meetings have led to hundreds of good ideas, five product prototypes and even a patent application, he said.

Burney laid out Microsoft's overall collaboration platform around SharePoint and Office, which includes enterprise search, business intelligence and enterprise content management.

Clearly, it's a comprehensive product line, available through the Microsoft Office tools that many people are familiar with. But given some of the scenarios that Burney described with companies collaborating with outside customers, partners and other affiliates, an open question is how well SharePoint and Office can work with non-Microsoft environments for collaboration.

Critics of the U.S. patent system have long griped that it's entirely too easy to get patents these days on obvious or otherwise unmeritorious inventions--in part because overworked patent examiners don't have ready access to information about what's already out there.

A yearlong pilot project, endorsed by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in partnership with the New York Law School, is supposed to help.

The goal behind the Peer to Patent Project, officially launched last Friday, is to allow anyone who's interested to weigh in on 250 pending patent applications belonging to one of the more difficult categories to decipher: that including computer architecture, software and information security.

The project's Web site provides forums for discussing applications and tools for researching and sharing "prior art" references--that is, evidence that an invention already exists. It then allows for the top 10 of those references to be forwarded on to the Patent Office.

Right now, five applications from Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel and Red Hat are available for review. A number of other firms, including CA, General Electric, Intellectual Ventures, Microsoft, Oracle, Sun Microsystems and Yahoo, have also put in requests to participate.

Involvement in the project comes with some perks: Instead of having to deal with the average four-year waiting period to get a patent application reviewed, the applications selected to participate can essentially butt ahead in line and get turned around in one year, according to the project's organizers.

An idea resembling the Patent Office-sanctioned project has also cropped up in the form of a site called WikiPatents.com, which was launched last summer by a patent lawyer based in Salt Lake City. The United Kingdom is reportedly considering a similar approach.