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Online power to the people
12/12/2006 09:45 - (SA)
San Francisco - The founder of Wikipedia announced on Monday that he planned to give more online power to the people by providing free software and hosting services for collaborative websites.
Jimmy Wales said a free service dubbed OpenServing.com "would go live shortly" to give anyone the ability to build websites devoted to shared interests.
OpenServing computers would host the websites.
Website creators will get to keep all the advertising revenues, "providing a whole new world of entrepreneurial business models to bloggers and website owners", according to a release from Wales's company Wikia.
The websites would be built as "wikis", which means their content could be edited or changed by visitors in the communal style used at Wikipedia, a popular, multi-language online encyclopaedia refined by those that use it.
"Social change has accelerated beyond the original Wikipedia concept of six years ago," Wales said.
"OpenServing is the next phase of this experiment. We don't have all the business model answers, but we are confident, as we always have been, that the wisdom of our community will prevail."
The six "pillars" of Wikia's OpenServing were listed as free software, bandwidth, storage, computing power, online content, and "giving away" the ad revenue to those who create online community websites.
On the net:
www.wikipedia.org/
- AFP
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