AboutUs: A Wiki About Every Website
Summary
The Board of Advisors for AboutUs includes wiki forefather Ward Cunningham, Stephen Babson of Endeavour Capital and Keith Teare of Edgeio. There is something that bothers me about having 3 million pages about websites, populated automatically and by any random editor who stops by, titled “AboutUs.” The phrase implies an autobiographical text. The site hasn’t been monetized yet; Ray King says they will explore premium features like paid job listings on company pages. I probed ruthlessly for some indication of an antisocial profit drive in King, as it took me a while to believe that a business based on content scraped from the WhoIs records of other sites could be legitimate. In the end, though, I was convinced that King really is a true believer in “the wiki way,” as he calls it, a collaborative culture based on presumptions of good faith.