wiki

Just back from a business trip to Europe and Asia, Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis has decided to make some cuts, firing nearly 10% of the staff and has started to rent out space to other startups. From what we understand, the rentals started earlier as Techcrunch50 finalist CauseCast has been renting space for a while. It's good to see Jason took my advice from last week.

The staffers who were fired today are absolutely the best of the best. In London at FOWA, Calacanis explained that he only hires the top, best possible talent. This should probably help the fired staffers with future job inquiries. Good luck to all of those who lost their jobs at Mahalo today and if I can be of any help, send me an email.

One of the questions I've wondered about and have been asked for my opinion a number of times over the past month is whether the startups that are firing staff are doing it because of the economy or because their business model concepts or actual ideas are the real issue. It's a very difficult question to answer without getting a look at the information from the inside. I posed the question on Twitter and was pointed to Jonathan Gheller who recently closed his startup Fashmatch. He notes that it wasn't the economy that pushed them to close.

I certainly can't say which reason is at fault for Jason's decision to fire staff today. I can only assume it's economy related based on the fact that his entire team are the highest delivering employees possible.

My view on Mahalo is the same as it was day 1; to be successful they will need certain pages to drive the large share of revenue. While ads on the site now mirror exactly the other links on the page (this may actually confuse visitors), will that be enough to drive users to click on the ads? And how much does a page require to break-even? I've also started to see an overall drop in Mahalo's standings in Google. What used to be instant page 1 status now has been pushed further back. Mahalo has $20 million in funding so they have some runway to continue to refine their business model as they continue to grow.

Ashkan summarizes the Mahalo business model:

Mahalo’s traffic strategy right now is simply to jump on the latest, breaking news, publish a page on it, and hope that Google’s super quick spiders index their page… It’s a gimmick, not a worthless one, but not exactly priceless either.

There's been chatter about more Mahalo positions moving overseas. Our sources tell us that Jason has opened an office in Manilla. I don't want to speculate on what positions are located there yet - we are still waiting for some final confirmation. We were provided this photo which was shot by a Mahalo staffer of what appears to be (unconfirmed) the Mahalo team in Manilla. I count 25 people in the photo.

NY-based collegiate information resource CollegeWikis has announced that they have raised $2 million in venture capital today. From the announcement, The funding round led by HighBAR Ventures, an early stage venture capital firm founded by Bill Joy, Andreas Bechtolsheim, and Roy Thiele-Sardiña. Richmond Management, eCoast Angel Network, and Boston Harbor Angels also participated. Thiele-Sardiña will join CollegeWikis Board of Directors as part of this financing.

They are quick to note that CollegeWikis is not a social network. To actually read any of the content on CollegeWikis you need to register. You can register with any email address but the site notes that .edu accounts will receive additional benefits.

I see more "message board" than "wiki" when I browse the site. While you can edit the question, it isn't as topical based as Wikipedia is. From my browsing, it's question-based, "Where's the best eats at Harvard?" Not that there's anything wrong with a cross-university message board.

MindTouch has announced the launch of Deki for CRM today at the Web 2.0 Expo in NYC. Deki for CRM combines the MindTouch Deki Enterprise Server and SnapLogic's open source data integration framework. The concept is relatively simple: CRM systems are limited in collaboration functionality. Deki for CRM hopes to change that by adding a Wiki to nearly everything inside of the CRM system.

When you look at a customer record inside of a CRM, the Deki for CRM option allows you to add an open wiki-style box where you can collaborate with your colleagues about the customer. Deki for CRM also offers pre-made widgets for stock price, Google News searches and Twitter results. The idea with the widgets is to track the customer across the Web.

MindTouch notes that Deki for CRM will work with any CRM platform. They have pre-configured installations for SugarCRM and Salesforce.com. The basic service comes at a cost of $15,000.

BienSimple is a new Spanish-language wiki produced by Fox and their Fox International division. BienSimple combines editor produced content with a open wiki format to allow site visitors to contribute as well. An account is required to contribute.

The content on BienSimple is wide in variety including the following categories: kitchen, autos, money, relationships, beauty and technology. In addition to the text-based wiki, there's video from the BienSimple editors.

Hector Costa, SVP FOX Networks Americas said, "Bien Simple's content has a natural affinity with US Hispanics' inclination towards finding their own solutions to everyday problems." The ads on BienSimple are in Spanish which is different than the strategy AOL is using with their Fanaticos spanish-language sports site.

Wikia Search has launched a new Firefox toolbar which they call Wikia Evolution. Wikia Evolution is available for download and offers an easy to way to add pages to the Wikia Search project.

Here's how the Wikia Evolution toolbar works once installed. When you search on Google, Yahoo, etc. or view any Web page, a new set of options will be displayed (see the sample below). The options allow you to add the page to the Wikia Search index instantly and tag the page for the appropriate keywords. There's also a rating option available for each page that is submitted into the search database.

Wikia founder Jimmy Wales said on the Evolution toolbar launch, “This toolbar, like everything we are doing at Wikia Search, is open source. We hope that if you are a toolbar fan and programmer, you will let us know what features need to be added and/or take this and do something surprising and cool with it.”

NY-based BricaBox which closed its doors last month, is now back as an open source platform. CEO Nate Westhimer explains, "I’ve heard from a number of people that open sourcing — or "freeing" — the code would be a good way to let the dream live on. After speaking with with several folks in the open source and free software communities, I believe this is the right thing to do."

Nate is now looking for developers to help with the forward progress of open sourcing the BricaBox code. I need to be honest here. I don't think this is a wise move. First, Nate has already moved on and will he really want to be attached to BricaBox going forward? Second, was the application ever really finished? Nate shared the lessons he learned by running BricaBox and that should have been the end of it - or perhaps a full sale of IP and domain. What I think would have made sense is to offer code snippets that developers could use in their applications like the Google Maps mashup, etc.

It will be interesting to see what the open source experts at Ostatic think of this move. Check out all of our BricaBox coverage.

Earlier today Google announced that Google Knol is now open to the public. Danny Sullivan has an awesome overview of how Google Knol works.

I thought this would be a good time to compare three crowdsourced encyclopedias: Mahalo, Google Knol and Wikipedia. Each one takes a different angle on why you should contribute.

Do you participate in any of these crowdsourced encyclopedias? If so, what factors helped make your decision? Was it to help the "greater good" or was it a financial decision?

Here are some thoughts on each encyclopedia and why people contribute to each:

Wiki provider Wetpaint is announcing tonight that they have hit the one million mark. The one million number represents "created" wikis on the Wetpaint platform, not active customers. It also seems the company is now marketing their service as "social publishing" rather than wikis. I think wiki is well known in the tech market but social publishing might be more mainstream-friendly.

Wetpaint also released the following stats:

• 8 million pages of content in the network
• users from 177 countries have created wikis on the Wetpaint platform

They are also announcing the launch of the "Golden Paint Can Awards" which will give prizes to 70 Wetpaint sites in 15 categories. Winners will be selected by a celebrity panel of judges, stats and a public vote. I always like to see companies show off their customers, it helps with goodwill with the current customer base and also helps potential customers see what's possible with the application or service. Zlio does a good job of this - they feature one shop every day on their blog.

Wetpaint picked up $25 million in venture capital funding back in May and also released 10 tips on Web 2.0'ing your office.

Wikia Search is announcing today the launch of a suite of statistics and tools for research and reporting on the Wikia Search application. The site statistics tool offers information on queries, contributions and their social network. The statistics can be run by the day or month and there are some Ajaxy sliders for more details. And for those of you with a math calculator, standard deviations are provided.

There are also a few site tools launching today:

• Most Queries
• Most Contributions
• Recent Top Queries
• Recent Top Contributions
• Most Wanted - the difference between top queries and top contributions
• Keyword Trends

Most recently we reported on Wikia Search adding Google AdSense advertising to the search results.

Back in January, Wikia launched the Alpha version of Wikia Search. We said it "wasn't ready". Last month they made some major additions to the engine. Today they are rolling out the next Alpha version of the engine. I've embedded a video below that explains the updates. So far the company claims 20,000 users have registered, 25,000 mini-articles created, and 60,000 edits have been processed to-date.

I spoke with CEO Jimmy Wales who explained the updates to the alpha search engine. Wales noted that many of the new features are "wiki-like" and that you can now edit any search result as you see fit. Add, delete or update any link within a search result. You can also annotate, or preview, a URL in the search result. There's also the ability to highlight a site in the results if you feel it's worthy.

Here are all of the new features inside of the Wikia Search which allow anyone to customize the search results:

• The ability to edit any result, title and summary. The edits are then instantly available to everyone
• The ability to add new results for any search query instantly
• The ability to delete and/or hide any result
• Every result item can be rated 1-5 stars, which will slowly influence the ranking position
• The ability to add suggested and/or related searches for any query
• The ability to add public comments to any result item
• The opportunity to see site previews and annotate text, images, links and forms directly into the results
• The ability to try any search on Google, Yahoo, or any other search engine with a single click
• The ability to customize the background on the header for a more themed result for any search
• The opportunity to view the change history showing all the social actions for any page

read more and view video demo »