10.24.09
A small wedding gift
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 first of all, Martin is a very successful entrepreneur who obviously can have any ordinary thing that he wants. And on top of that, the wedding website suggested that gifts were not necessary.
Well, I just can’t stand to go to a wedding without a gift so I thought really really hard. What would Martin want and appreciate, that I might be able to get?
And suddenly I realized it. Martin has been bugging me to help him figure out a way for his Educar charity to distribute Wikipedia (in Spanish) to schools without Internet connections. The problem is that there has not been a simple offline reader on a DVD in Spanish (or, really, most other languages).
There has been a lot of good work to get a cut-down version of Wikipedia onto the OLPC, but this is a different and in many ways not as difficult project. Some people are very interested in working on the concept of offline editing, but for me, that’s secondary for now. What we need is a version of Wikipedia that is downloadable as an ISO, burnable to a DVD (all the articles of Spanish Wikipedia fits on a DVD pretty easily), with a decent (doesn’t have to be perfect) search and display functionality, using all free software so there are no obstacles to further distribution and modification.
So, this blog post is my wedding gift. I’m putting some effort into pulling together the people who are working on this… and finding some new friends to help us get this done!
I’m looking for more volunteers to help with the effort. SJ (a fellow board member at the Wikimedia Foundation) is helping coordinate various people, and we’re launching a new mailing list to get this effort some energy. If you want to help please let me know in the comments, or just email me!
The work we do on this will not just be about Spanish, of course! Many languages will benefit. But I’m starting with Spanish as a gift to my friends Martin and Nina. Mozel tov, Martin and Nina!
10.21.09
Is the Magazine Dead?
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 to be at first, but I see the potential for a huge future here.
Recently, Conde Nast announced the closure of Gourmet Magazine. What happened there? It’s really very very simple: the traditional magazine has not kept pace with the needs of readers or advertisers. It isn’t that reading is going out of style – quite the opposite. It isn’t that people don’t care about quality – quite the opposite. The death of the traditional magazine has come about because people are demanding more information, of better quality, and faster.
Take a look at the web traffic rankings (according to Quantcast) of Gourmet Magazine’s site and Wikia’s recipes site.
October 21st Quantcast rank for Gourmet Magazine
October 21st Quantcast rank for recipes.wikia.com
How did this happen? How did a Recipes wiki become more popular than one of the most famous food magazines?
It’s because Gourmet offered a handful of recipes and articles per month, while Recipes offers literally thoughts of recipes on-demand anytime anyone wants.
But there still *is* value in the paper form-factor and there still *is* value in carefully selected “best of” content, delivered on a per-issue or subscription basis: and that’s where the MagCloud/Wikia partnership comes in.
Communities can now produce print magazines of higher quality, and of a more timely and customized nature than traditional print magazines can. YOU can publish your own cooking magazine or cookbook on Wikia. (Make one for your family, with all your great grandmother’s favorite recipes?)
I predict that this could end up having a huge impact on dozens of titles. How soon will car magazines be replaced by our auto wikis?
I’d like to hire the former publisher of Gourmet Magazine – and the publishers of many more magazines, because I think they will be valuable assets at a company which knows where the world is heading.
It won’t happen overnight. But the growth of Wikia appears to be on a trajectory as overwhelming and consistent as what Wikipedia experienced.
As Clay Shirky put it in the title of his book, “Here Comes Everybody”.
