Federal Antitrust Probe Targets Google, Yahoo and Apple. (Washington Post)

Plaintiff’s Lawyers Allege NebuAd Staged Closing. (Mediapost)

Silicon Alley vs. Silicon Valley. (WSJ)

Jason Calacanis Tries Turning Mahalo Into a Wikipedia That Pays. (MediaMemo)

Alibaba Plans To Spend At Least $200 Million On Acquisitions. (Paidcontent)

Microsoft issues $100 million manifesto’ for Bing. (AdAge)

Many see the move as a direct challenge to search kingpin Google. Powerset – its mission is to search better, faster, more accurately – hopes to conquer online terrain far beyond the boundaries of Wikipedia, but it will use the online encyclopedia as a training ground.

In the future, Powerset also hopes to sell interactive advertisements with its search services. Lurking behind the news of its search service, is the rumor that the company is up for sale – and Microsoft may have $100 million worth of interest, according to widespread reports.

Except for No. 7: Wikipedia. And there lies a delicate situation.

With 2 million articles in English alone, the Internet encyclopedia “anyone can edit” stormed the Web’s top ranks through the work of unpaid volunteers and the assistance of donors. But that gives Wikipedia far less financial clout than its Web peers, and doing almost anything to improve that situation invites scrutiny from the same community that proudly generates the content.

And so, much as how its base of editors and bureaucrats endlessly debate touchy articles and other changes to the site, Wikipedia’s community churns with questions over how the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation, which oversees the project, should get and spend its money.

Should it proceed on its present course, soliciting donations largely to keep its servers running? Or should it expand other sources of revenue — with ads, perhaps, or something like a Wikipedia game show — to fulfill grand visions of sending DVDs or printed books to people who lack computers? Is it helpful — or counter to the project’s charitable, free-information mission — to have the Wikimedia Foundation tight with a prominent venture capital firm?

These would be tough questions for any organization, let alone one in which hundreds of participants can expect to have a say.

The system “has strengths and weaknesses,” says Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia’s co-founder and “chairman emeritus.” “The strength is, we don’t do anything randomly, without lots and lots of lots of discussion. The downside is we don’t get anything done unless we actually come to a conclusion.”

Even the foundation’s leaders aren’t unified. Florence Devouard, a French plant scientist who chairs the board, said she and other Europeans involved with the project are more skeptical than Americans such as Wales about moneymaking side projects with for-profit entities.

The project’s financial situation is not exactly dire. Although the group does not have an endowment fund with interest fuelling operations, cash contributions jumped to $2.2-million last year, from $1.3-million in the prior year. With big gifts recently, the foundation’s budget is $4.6-million this year.

In the past year, the foundation has tried to become less of an ad hoc outfit, expanding staff from less than 10 people to roughly 15 and moving to San Francisco from St. Petersburg, Fla. It has a new executive director, Sue Gardner, formerly head of the Canadian Broadcasting Corp.’s Web operations, who expects to add professional fund-raisers and improve ties with Wikimedia patrons.

“Two years ago, if you donated $10,000, you might not even get a phone call or a thank-you letter,” Wales said. “That’s just not acceptable.”

Gardner appears to favour an incremental strategy, stretching the staff to 25 people by 2010, with the budget increasing toward $6-million. Even such relatively simple changes, she said, would keep the foundation from missing out on business partnerships and other opportunities.

For example, project leaders would like to hold “Wikipedia Academies” in developing countries, to encourage new cadres of contributors in other languages. Wales also wants to implement software that makes it less technically daunting for newcomers to edit Wikipedia articles — an idea that has been discussed for at least two years.

It might seem surprising that such a low-key agenda could prove contentious, given that Wikimedia and Wales have also encountered complaints of being incautious with donors’ money. But some Wikipedians want the foundation to be spending more.

“Why should they have to be wise spending such a little amount of money when they could have so much more?” said Nathan Awrich, a Wikipedia contributor from Vermont who advocates limited ads on the site, to help pay for technical improvements, better outreach and even a legal-defence fund. “This is not a foundation that needs to last one more year. This is a foundation that needs to be planning for a longer term, and it doesn’t seem like they’re doing it.”

Gardner said she opposes advertising unless it came down to a choice between “shutting down the servers and putting ads on the site. I don’t think we’re ever going to get to that point, so I don’t see advertising as an issue.”

Wales sounds political on the matter. On one hand, he said he believes “advertising is really a nonstarter” because of the potential harm to Wikipedia’s non-commercial image. However, he also said the subject requires more research, so Wikipedians truly understand how much money the project is leaving on the table by rejecting ads.

“I think it’s a fallacy to say learning about something implies you want to do it,” he said. “I would like to learn about it because I suspect it’s not worth it.”

Another subject getting carefully parsed is the foundation’s relationship with Elevation Partners, the venture firm co-founded by Roger McNamee and U2′s Bono. Elevation owns stakes in Forbes magazine and Palm Inc., among other companies.

McNamee has donated at least $300,000 to the Foundation, according to Danny Wool, a former Wikimedia employee who processed the transactions. More recently, the foundation said, McNamee introduced the group to people who made separate $500,000 gifts. Their identities have not been disclosed.

Officially, Gardner and McNamee say he is a merely a fan of Wikimedia’s free-information project, separate from Elevation’s profit-making interests. “He has been clear — when he talks to me, he’s talking as a private individual,” Gardner said.

Yet the relationship runs deeper than that would suggest.

Another Elevation partner, Marc Bodnick, has met with Wales multiple times and went to a 2007 Wikimedia board meeting in the Netherlands. (Wales described that as a “get to know you session” and said Elevation, among many other venture firms, quickly learned that the foundation was not interested in changing its core, non-profit mission.) Bodnick and Bono had also been with Wales in 2006 in Mexico City, where U2 was touring. On a hotel rooftop, Bono suggested that Wikipedia use its volunteer-written articles as a starting point, then augment that with professionals who would polish and publish the content, according to two people who were present. Bono compared it to Bob Dylan going electric — a jarring move that people came to love.

McNamee and Bodnick declined to comment.

Although Wales says no business with Elevation is planned, that hasn’t quelled that element ever-present in Wikipedia: questions.

In the recent interview, Devouard, the board chair, said she believed Elevation was interested in being more than just friends, though she wasn’t sure just what the firm hoped to get out of the non-profit project.

“It is easy to see which interest WE have in getting their interest,” she wrote to Wales that day on an internal board mailing list, in an exchange obtained by The Associated Press. “The contrary is not obvious at all: Can you explain to me why EP (Elevation Partners) are interested in us?”

Brian Bergstein is a writer for the Associated Press

Compliments of the AP

The interest leading up to and post-awards show is undeniable with millions of searches going on for actors, films and miscellaneous information concerning the show starting from the announcements of the nominees.

Researching the effects of the show on traffic, we came across a comprehensive graph on compete.com that displays the top referring domains for Oscar related searches.

Included with the graph was a listing of the top 10 destination domains findings which outlines the specialization of each site.

Top 10 Destination Domains Findings:
• Oscars.org (the home of The American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences) and oscar.com (the home of the Annual Academy Awards) are not surprisingly the top two sites for anything and everything Oscars.

• The specialized Oscar sections of yahoo.com and aol.com catapulted these portals into the Top 10 list; MSN’s Academy Awards sections failed to attract the same attention falling to number 28 on the list.

• The specialist imdb.com fell behind the generalist wikipedia.org. Imdb lost this battle despite the fact that it is devoted exclusively to films and television and even has a link to its Oscars section on the homepage.

• Filmsite.org, a small film appreciation site which typically attracts between 200-250 thousand unique visitors is up there playing with the big leaguers. Never underestimate the focused and determined little guy.

• Entertainment Weekly is dominating the pre-awards traffic. Notable competitors include variety.com at number 20 and people.com all the way at 101. I am interested in seeing if this trend continues after the show airs.

• With the home field advantage and a prominent link to the Oscars section on it’s homepage, the LA Times catapulted into the Top 10 list, leaving behind The New York Times (49), CNN (62), ABC (71), and USAToday (72).

With some of the results surprising many including the recipients such as Marion Cotillard for best actress in “La Vie en Rose,” Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova for best original song in “Once”, and Tilda Swinton for best supporting actress in “Michael Clayton”; chances are, Fandango and Netflix will be enjoying a spike in traffic as well.

Graph and list compliments of compete.com.

He said of this data “As a result, information that is intended for public use is rendered effectively invisible to citizen users.” The report continued that Leslie Phillips, spokeswoman for Sen. Joe Lieberman, who chairs the committee, said that Needham is one of four witnesses who will testify how agencies can improve accessibility to online government information by using new technologies.

Needham is going to offer the suggestion of adopting a technical standard that helps a site owner list, or map all the agency’s database records and pages. The map can then be read and indexed by search engines. Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia is also expected to testify.

See something that’s incorrect or biased? Does an article need more information? Simply click “edit this page” and make your changes. Your knowledge will be added for all to reference. And the man behind this project, according to the Wikipedia itself, is Jimmy Wales: entrepreneur and staunch advocate of open reference media.

Wikipedia and other projects under the banner of Wales’s non-profit Wikimedia Foundation support the GNU Free Documentation License, originally designed for software developer Richard Stallman’s Free Software Foundation. Even Wales’s commercial wiki hosting venture, Wikia, requires all hosted content to be under a free content license like GNU or Creative Commons.

According to Wales, he has always had a passion for knowledge, often reading his parents’ World Book encyclopedia as a kid. He describes himself as “a voracious reader of all kinds of things.” His mother and grandmother ran a small private school in Huntsville, Alabama where he was first educated. His father, a grocery store manager, didn’t graduate from college until returning to school later in life.

After getting a masters in finance from the University of Alabama and nearly completing his Ph.D at Indiana University, Wales set off for Chicago and made his fortune trading futures and stock options—not enough for him to call himself wealthy, but enough to live comfortably within his means.

“A large part of my studies and training was in game theory,” says Wales. Game theory is a branch of mathematics used in economics to model social interactions and their unforeseen consequences. “That has shaped how I manage the communities and how I have designed the social structure around Wikipedia.”

The community nature of Wikipedia allows it to be edited and reedited time after time, which gives it unprecedented breadth and timeliness. But that same openness can sometimes lead to “wiki vandalism,” where someone will publish bogus information on a particular topic, or to bias in controversial topics. The community is designed to quickly spot and correct those inaccuracies, with flags to point out articles that need attention and lockdowns to prevent anonymous contributions.

Following his success in the financial arena, Wales started his first commercial venture in 1996, an advertising-supported webring-style portal called Bomis.com, the company that would eventually fund Wikipedia’s early development. Until 2005, Bomis featured a premium section that allowed subscribers to view photos of hot babes. A few have criticized Bomis for offering pornography, but Wales equates Bomis’s babes to the types of photographs seen in men’s magazines like Maxim.

When he began his open encyclopedia project, Wales hired Larry Sanger, a doctor of philosophy he knew through the internet. They wrote frequently back and forth on each others online mailing lists. Both men shared similar interests, one of them being philosophy. Sanger refers to himself and Wales as “debate partners.” They had originally met face-to-face for the first time in 1995, says Sanger, when they were both still graduate students. Wales invited Sanger, who was traveling cross-country, to stay over in Chicago where he was living at the time.

In January 2000, Wales got word that Sanger was looking to start what would today be called a cultural blog. Wales offered him a position as chief editor and designer of the Nupedia project, a Bomis-sponsored initiative that was to be a freely accessible online encyclopedia, but contained an extensive 7-step top-down review process to ensure quality and accuracy.

Sanger took the job with Bomis, but the mechanics of Nupedia would initially doom it to failure. The idea was to have scholars write content for free and publish publicly through Nupedia. Unfortunately, through its three-year lifespan, Nupedia’s review process had only been able to fully approve 24 articles. “It was no fun for anybody,” says Wales.

Clearly, Nupedia was too complicated. Wales and Sanger sought a solution. According to Sanger, he was the one who brought Wales’s attention to a little-known web program called WikiWikiWeb written by developer Ward Cunningham in 1994. “Wiki” is a Hawaiian word meaning “fast,” and Cunningham designed WikiWikiWeb as a platform to quickly and automatically create links and web pages related to each other through common keywords.

Wales took the Wiki idea and commissioned an encyclopedic version of the platform to quickly generate content that could then be vetted and added to the Nupedia project. The idea was to cast a wide net and keep this new online encyclopedia as open as possible for as long as possible. At first Wales was nervous about what the results would be. “The first few days I had it up, I would get up late at night and check the site, convinced somebody would trash everything, but nobody ever did,” says Wales.

For the first year or so, as head of the Nupedia project, Sanger also ran the new Wikipedia, dubbing himself the “Chief Instigator,” building the Wikipedia community and writing many of the Wikipedia’s policies, many of which are still followed today. Wales gave him complete freedom to direct the project.

Sites on the Wikipedia ranked ninth overall, drawing in 42.9 million users last month, beating out sites from the New York Times, Apple and Viacom.

Wikipedia already ranks in the top ten globally, but has seen dramatic growth in the US, rising from number 33 last year, according the IDG news service.

Most of the US Web growth seen by comScore reflects interest in taxes due to the onset of tax season, politics, due to the interest in the 2008 presidential election, and travel, due to the winter season. “As we’ve witnessed on an annual basis, consumers turned to the Web at the beginning of the year in a very utilitarian fashion, with an eye toward planning,” said comScore Media Metrics SVP Jack Flanagan in a statement.

The web measurement firm’s total for Wikipedia also included other sites sponsored by Jimmy Wales’s Wikimedia Foundation like the Wiktionary and Wikibooks, but the majority came from the encyclopedia.

Wikipedia contains more than 6 million articles in English and 249 other languages.

As a standard search engine, Wikiseek uses Seekme’s technology to query many vertical search engines simultaneously and uses those results to suggest what the user is most likely looking for. Users can also refine their search by selecting additional related search categories which are updated as they type.

Text link advertising is displayed in a column on the right-hand side. An undisclosed majority of the advertising proceeds are going to the Wikimedia Foundation.

“It just makes sense to donate the majority of the advertising revenue to the Wikimedia Foundation since our search results are enabled by the work done by Wikipedia volunteers,” said Searchme CEO Randy Adams in a statement.

Wikiseek is still in beta, and is continually being updated based on user suggestions and new Wikipedia content. The engine is supposed to ward off SEO spam because all of the highly ranked pages on Wikiseek have been approved by human Wikipedia editors. “Every time somebody edits a Wikipedia page, our search engine gets better,” added Adams.

Searchme has also produced a Firefox extension that replaces the standard Wikipedia search with Wikiseek.

Like the non-profit Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia that anyone can edit, Wikiasari will rely on users to provide the content in order to overcome the many irrelevant results from standard search engines arising from spam and SEM. “Google is very good at many types of search, but in many instances it produces nothing but spam and useless crap. Try searching for the term ‘Tampa hotels’, for example, and you will not get any useful results,” said Wales in an interview with The Times Online of London.

The Wikiasari project will be the third division of Wikia, Wales’s for-profit Wiki company, which has completed a round of funding that included investments from Amazon.com. According to TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington, a large chunk of the proceeds generated by the search engine will be donated to the Wikipedia project.

“Just as Wikipedia revolutionized how we think about knowledge and the encyclopedia, we have a chance now to revolutionize how we think about search,” wrote Wales on the Wikia home page.

The relationship between Yahoo! and Wikipedia will offer users a narrower search that will lead to more specific information. For example, a search for the word “coffee” offers quick links to coffee bean types, history and etymology (of coffee), and the café. These quick links take the user to the main section of the Wikipedia entry that contains the information.

Yahoo! has also recently added new features to its beta version of Yahoo! Answers, which offers a question and answer exchange that allows users to tap into knowledge from web users all over the world. New features include an Ajax widget that searches previously asked questions the user types a question, a badge that bloggers and website owners can customized and display on their sites, and an expanded help section for users.