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 the latter. But until recently I hadn’t seen a great example of how the two approaches could come together, co-exist and truly complement each other to form something greater than the sum of the parts – which I believe is the future of the web. (Allow me to call it now: this is what we are going to come to call Web 3.0.)

Hunch.com’s combination of community-sourced content and algorithmically-driven smarts is forging a promising path towards this potential future. And that’s why I’ve decided to join Hunch as a Board Member and an active advisor for the company’s ongoing development. As a result, I’ll be spending some time in Hunch’s NYC offices.

Hunch may be new to many of you; it was launched just 6 months ago. But the decision-making site, powered by a passionate community of active contributors, has already made significant progress and garnered respectable press. I’m impressed with the product, the Hunch community and the Hunch team, but mostly by the great potential I believe the company and its model have to intelligently fuse human input with machine smarts.

I’m looking forward to working closely with the Hunch team going forward (not to mention spending a lot more time in NYC!)

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!

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”. 

Wow, coming on the heels of the great news I got yesterday about our Comscore numbers…

W00t!

Just for fun, here’s a comparison of Wikia (all sites) with Mahalo (all sites).  Some of you may know that Jason Calacanis enjoys poking at me and not long ago made a bit of a stir in the blogosphere by calling me a poser and saying I’m not a real entrepreneur.  Who’s posing now, Jason?  (Actually I love and respect Jason, even if he does like to talk trash, and had a nice visit with him at Mahalo not long ago, so this is all in fun.  But I dare you tweet this blog post, Jason… ;-) )

Wikia vs Mahalo

Note: the above are screenshots, you can see the live numbers for Wikia stats as well!

I just saw our July ComScore numbers and wow!  In June we posted more than 5 million unique visitors, with 5 and a quarter million.  That was great, and a 10% increase over the month before.

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

There are several reasons for this, mostly based on software changes that we’ve made in the past few months.  (I.E. this isn’t a launch-related spike, this is strong organic growth).  I’ll detail some of that soon, just waiting on some other numbers to break. :)

My view of Wikia is that we’re spreading the growth of free culture out of purely academic/research and pushing the boundaries of what is possible in new media and free licensing.  Exciting stuff to see it really resonate with people…

At the office they are celebrating with a trampoline!

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

If there is one thing that I’ve learned in my career, it is to do more of what’s working, and less of what’s not.

In past 24 months, Wikia.com has seen tremendous expansion. Nielsen recently recognized Wikia.com as the fifth fastest growing member community destination in February 2009:

Source:
http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/twitters-tweet-smell-of-success/

Our Wikianswers Q&A site in particular has seen tremendous growth since it was re-launched in February, and we’ll be investing more of our time in it. Our gaming and entertainment networks and communities also continue to see strong growth.

On the other hand, while I personally believe in the opportunity for free software to make serious inroads into the search space, our project, Wikia Search, has not been enjoying the kind of success that we had hoped.

In a different economy, we would continue to fund Wikia Search indefinitely. It’s something I care about deeply. I will return to again and again in my career to search, either as an investor, a contributor, a donor, or a cheerleader.

But for now, we will be closing the doors on the Wikia Search project (as of March 31, 2009) and will be re-directing and refocusing resources on other Wikia.com properties, especially on Wikianswers. Join me there to help provide freely licensed answers to all the world’s questions.

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.

Well, I don’t think it is up to me to give him advice because he obviously knows more about the current situation than I do.  But not to long ago somebody asked me if the new President could change the reputation of our country in the first hundred days he was in the office and I said he could change the reputation of our country in the first ten minutes that he was in the office. This was a reporter from The Guardian newspaper in London and they said how he could do that. I said we can make his inaugural speech on the stage. I will be on the stage with him by the way. I could say while I am President we will never again torture anybody, while I am President we will never start another war unless our own security is directly threatened and when I am President we will be the fore front of the whole world in protecting the environment against global warming or any other challenges and when I am President of the United States we will help to eliminate all the nuclear weapons in the world and while I am President we do our best we can to make sure our tax laws favor the working people and poor people instead of just the richest people in the United States. So I said if he will say these things in the first ten minutes, our whole reputation around the world would be improved.

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.

Daniel F. Gass, who signs his emails “15 year old conquering the web” already conquered a part of it since last night, creating a Wikia search plugin for Firefox! Awesome! Thanks, Daniel!

Now I wonder what open source toolbars out there might support more functionality…