It's Wiki time

Last week, there was the second annual Wikimania conference and yes, the keynote was Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia. While Wikipedia may not be as hip as YouTube or MySpace, it certainly sucks up a lot of Web traffic (about 4% of daily traffic on the Net).

Simply put, a wiki is a website that allows people to publish and comment on articles. Wikipedia has about 3.8 million articles in 100 languages.

True, quantity hasn't been a problem. Instead the concern is the quality of the content. And that was the theme of Wales' keynote. Although, the open-source approach of Wikipedia has been working quite well. A recent study in Nature found four errors in Wikipedia for every three in the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

A big play for wikis may be the Corporate World. There are a variety of companies – such as Jot and Near-Time – that are building corporate wiki tools. For example, eBay uses Jot to allow its 200 million person community to write and edit articles on how to better use the auction site.

I interviewed Joe Kraus, the CEO of JotSpot. According to him: "The wiki metaphor is a really powerful one. It turns the web from a monologue into a dialogue. The problem is that wikis have been trapped in the land of the nerds. Our goal is to bring them to the mainstream by making wikis more user-friendly... we see rapid adoption of the JotSpot wiki by non-technical users who are using the wiki to collaborate on anything from movie production to planning class reunions and family vacations."

There's another interesting company called MyWikiBiz.com. Basically, it writes up Wikipedia entries to help get companies exposure. According to the company's founder, Gregory Kohs: "I just can't fathom how a company's marketing or communications manager can shut off the lights for the night, knowing that his or her organization is missing out on a daily Wikipedia market of 6 million people – each of them hungry for information."