Apr 16 2011

What should I put on the agenda at the upcoming e-G8?

Bobbie Johnson at Gigaom worries: Is France Plotting to Kill the Free Internet?, and “can’t help be concerned at what the summit might mean, given it’s essentially a closed shop of governments and corporations discussing how best to carve up the online world for us.”

I’m happy to say that I’ve been invited to participate in this meeting, and I’d like for it not to be just that. I’m therefore turning to you for help: what should I put onto the agenda? What are the important perspectives that are likely to be overlooked or ignored? What do you want to say about the Internet to the leaders of the G8 countries?

Dec 7 2009

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What’s new for me: Hunch

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I’ve always been intrigued by the potential intersection of community-based, user-generated web platforms and algorithmic, machine-based ones. Wikipedia and Wikia have proven to do a pretty darn good job with the former. Search engines clearly do a great job with … Continue reading →

Oct 24 2009

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A small wedding gift

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This weekend I am attending the wedding of my friends Martin Varshavsky and Nina Wiegand. (They did a civil wedding in Hawaii a little while ago; this is the more traditional Jewish wedding.) I wanted to get a gift, but … Continue reading →

Oct 21 2009

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Is the Magazine Dead?

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At Wikia we are announcing this week the launch of HP MagCloud print-on-demand for Wikia users. The concept here is simple but powerful: let communities create magazines from their work seamlessly. We have no idea how popular this is going … Continue reading →

Aug 18 2009

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Wikia up 20%+ in July – 6.5 million US uniques

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July was insane – over 6.5 million US uniques, up by 24% over June! Continue reading →

Apr 3 2009

Wikia Gaming joins Wikia Entertainment in the 1 million article club

Just got some new numbers (thanks Doug and Przemek for putting these together) for Wikia’s growth, especially in gaming and entertainment, traditionally our strongest wikis.

Gaming just crossed 1,000,000 and currently with 1,003,977 articles… joining Entertainment (1.1 million articles) in the “over a million” category. The raw breakdown looks like this:

[Auto] => 15244
[Creative] => 57257
[Education] => 78914
[Entertainment] => 1109651
[Finance] => 12122
[Gaming] => 1003977
[Green] => 14113
[Humor] => 155243
[Lifestyle] => 201605
[Music] => 49232
[Philosophy] => 110072
[Politics] => 37381
[Science] => 120537
[Sports] => 80924
[Technology] => 52603
[Toys] => 35392
[Travel] => 57758
[Wikia] => 232869

Jan 20 2009

Jimmy Carter: “Obama can change our reputation in ten minutes”

Note: My daughter recently (December 5th, 2008) had the opportunity to conduct an interview with President Jimmy Carter. One of her questions to him was about Obama and ended up being about Obama’s speech today. So I thought I’d post an excerpt.

Kira: With the new president elect Barack Obama, what do you think about him being the new president elect and do you have any advice for him?
Jimmy Carter: Well, I have already talked to his major appointments – I have talked to the next Secretary of State and the next Security Advisor who will be in the White House with him and I have also yesterday talked with the person who is going to represent him and United States at the United Nations. So, I have already prepared him for some of the things that the Carter Center is doing that he might find helpful. Continue reading →

Feb 28 2008

Free software and social networking

Today at Wikia we have released our social networking features for MediaWiki under the GNU GPL 2.0. The best place to see this running live is at Halopedia, our Halo site.

I am excited about all the stuff going on in this space. With google’s open social initiative, our work in social search and social networking for mediawiki, I think the whole wiki/free culture space is about to get a whole lot more interesting.