Best known for its "enthusiast" wikis, Wikia hosts more than 50,000 fan sites including the Star Wars Wookieepedia, Harry Potter Wiki, Twilight Saga Wiki and World of Warcraft WoWWiki. In addition to some of the larger fan sites, Penchina also points to the Cannon Hacker Development Wiki, Recipes Wiki and Pet Diabetes Wiki as great examples of Wikia contributors.

While Wikia hosts nearly 3 million pages of content with a number of niche community sites, it's the fan pages that drive the majority of advertising and marketing revenue. Wikia's small team of less than 10 sales staff create packages that consist of everything from branded banner ads to embedded shows and contests. In addition to sponsors like World of Warcraft, a number of television studios are also in partnership talks.

Says Penchina, "In many cases, these sites are like small franchises and the editors are really dedicated. The input we've had from editors regarding advertising are suggestions I generally agree with." In the World of Warcraft Wiki the community has asked that no advertisements be permitted that might negatively affect game play. For this reason, Penchina's team does not allow advertisements for WoW gold.

By providing an environment where die hard fans and premium brands can coexist, Wikia is doing a great job maintaining its authenticity while also turning a profit. While the service has struggled to establish itself as a separate brand from its Wikipedia origins, it appears that the fan communities have done everything they can to make it a success from the ground up.

2. The Beatles (111,896): In the Telegraph's list for 2008, two different Beatles pages are listed as numbers 14 and 18 for 2008; however, according to the original Wikistics source statistics the "Beatles" page is ranked at number 20. In 2009, the page became the second most visited page on Wikipedia due to automated requests. The fact that the Fab Four's catalogue is due to be re-released in digitally remastered format within the year also can't hurt page traffic.

3. Michael Jackson (79,734): Not surprisingly, Michael Jackson's page is among the most viewed pages on Wikipedia. The day after Jackson's death the page received 5.9 million views. Of the top 10 most-viewed Wikipedia pages of 2009, Jackson's name is also mentioned on the Deaths in 2009 page and briefly in the Beatles page due to his controversial purchase of most of the Lennon-McCartney Beatles catalog in 1985.

*Favicon.ico (78,077): While the Telegraph articles lists this as number 4, it's irrelevant as the Wikistics stat source cites that the Favicon.ico ranking includes browser-based requests for the Wikipedia icon.

4. YouTube (72,318): Whether looking to cite corporate info or simply interested in finding out what the fuss is all about, Wikipedians have flocked to both YouTube and Facebook pages for the last two years.

5. Wikipedia (52,542)

6. Barack Obama (49,401): In 2008 the Barack Obama page was the 3rd most visited page on Wikipedia and not surprisingly, interest has dwindled post-election. Sarah Palin's page (64,465) was the 4th most visited page in 2008 and John McCain's page (34,486) was the 13th most visited page.

7. Deaths in 2009 (48,758): Apparently the public is clamoring to remember those they've lost in 2009. Both the Deaths in 2008 page and the 2009 page have made the top 10 list of most visited Wikipedia pages. It looks like memorial sites like My Death Space and Respectance aren't such a strange idea after all.

8. United States (46,545): This page offers basic information on politics, economics, demographics and customs of the United States. With a large population and a large number of Wikipedians hailing from the US, the page is a popular one. Surprisingly it is not listed on the community's most vandalized pages. Meanwhile both the US Democratic Party and Republican Party pages are listed.

9. Facebook (42,679)

10. Wikipedia Current Events Portal (40,962): This page lists daily news topics and the latest Wikinews articles. It is a great source for breaking news stories. The page also links to recent deaths and ongoing events such as the automotive industry crisis.

For the Telegraph's entire list visit the article. You can also check them against Wikistics list of yearly page hits for 2008 and 2009.

Another interesting resource is Wikipedia's most popular articles within the last hour. While recently deceased celebrities appeared on this list at the time this article was written, there were definitely some interesting anomalies. For instance, the Ernie Davis Wikipedia page saw a dramatic increase in hits. When cross-referenced against real time search engine Collecta it appears HBO was airing the Ernie Davis biography "The Express". Audience members were simultaneously watching television while searching for Davis' biography.

Tekarma was built by a team that includes a number of former eBay executives and engineers. The idea for the site, as Tekarma's Alex Kazim pointed out to us today, was to provide a comprehensive homepage for every product that would allow users to get tech support, read FAQs, and discuss the product with other users. The content on the site is completely user-generated, though Tekarma also uses Shopping.com's APIs to pull in product specs, which, however, can later be edited by the users.

Features

Every product page features four main sections: FAQs, Reviews, Web Resources, and Surprises. Surprises is actually one of the most interesting sections here, as this is where users can share information that is often left out of standard reviews such as the ground clearance of a car that a buyer would only notice after using it for a longer period of time.

While Tekarma features a price-comparison widget, Kazim told us that shopping is not the focus of the site. Instead, Tekarma, at least in its current iteration, focuses on providing support after a user has already bought the product. In the long run, once the site has more content, Kazim envisions that this may shift a bit, depending on how the users end up utilizing the site.

We liked Tekarma's user-interface, which makes browsing the site extremely easy. As Kazim pointed out to us, the team incorporated a lot of the lessons it learned at eBay into Tekarma's interface. One nice feature, for example, is that the service displays a list of your last search results in the left sidebar. Thanks to this, you don't have to constantly click the back button when searching for a specific product.

Good Start - Now All it Needs is More Users

Overall, while Tekarma is not necessarily revolutionary in its approach, we think that it has enough compelling features to set it apart from similar services like FixYa or product-specific forums. At the same time, though, Tekarma, like most services that rely on user-generated content, will have to attract a sizable number of active users to add content and fill the gaps in its current catalog.

Invites

If you would like to try out Tekarma and maybe add some of your own expertise to the system, you can follow this link. It will be valid for the first 100 readers who sign up for the service.

Midlife Crisis

During a talk at the Semantic Community-Semantic Exchange Workshop, Chris Rasmussen, a social-software knowledge manager and trainer at the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, outlined some of the reasons for this reluctance to adopt the Intellipedia.

One of these reasons cited by Rasmussen is a fear of the unknown. Instead of solely relying on Intellipedia, users often use additional, unconnected systems to save their information as well. Rasmussen also notes that some users are simply not comfortable with contributing information to a social-networking tool.

Rasmussen also points out some problems with the grass-roots approach that is at the core of the Intellipedia, which, by the way, is built on top of MediaWiki, the same software that powers the popular Wikipedia. As there is no standard for tagging articles, for example, users often use very 'agency-centric' terms to tag their posts, or use the wrong tags altogether.

Solution: Force People to Use It (?)

The solution to this? Rasmussen tells the GCN that the grass-roots approach has gotten them this far, but that a top-down approach might be necessary to push the project further: "This is work. We force people to do stuff [they don't want to do] all the time -- we make people come in sober and wear clothes. In certain cases top-down may not work, but in certain cases it does."

How does a small startup secure capital in such turbulent economic times? Being profitable helps - something AboutUs achieved by mid-year 2008. The company is forecasting continued growth this year. CEO Ray King says the company is targeting $5 million in revenue for 2009. The primary source remains advertising, but the online marketing services AboutUs sells - including content creation and custom page development - continue to gain traction.

AboutUs dynamically creates pages from publicly accessible information on Web sites, like meta tags and whois information. Once built, the pages - like any wiki - are available to be edited by the company, users, or anyone who visits the site. AboutUs also offers monitoring services to facilitate "reputation management" - knowing who is saying what about you where. When a monitored page is edited, users are alerted to both the change and the user who made the edit. And given that it's a wiki page, they can choose how best to deal with the edit.

For more information on the company and its offerings, visit the AboutUs page on AboutUs.org.

Helping First-Time Authors

As Sue Gardner, the Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation, points out in the announcement, most of the current Wikipedia authors have a "moderate-to-high level of technical understanding." This, however, excludes a large number of potential contributors who aren't very tech savvy, but would like to participate in the project.

The Wikimedia Foundation will use this grant to create a team of developers and user interface designers that will work on reducing barriers of entry for first-time authors. Specifically, the team will look at hiding the more complex elements of the user interface from users who don't need to deal with them.

To us, this seems like a worthwhile project. Anybody who has looked at the markup language for the Wikipedia knows that is anything but intuitive and that there is quite a learning curve involved before one can start to contribute anything more than simple edits. Reducing these barriers of entry will allow a whole new group of users to contribute their knowledge to the project.

It's a big deal, it's awkward, it's frightening, it's brave, it's already both loved and hated - but it's not a wiki. As Ward Cunningham, the man who invented wikis, told us in our initial coverage of SearchWiki, "Collectively editing thoughts is what leads to the unique wiki behavior..." Days into the experiment it's clear that this feature is more like a forum, and it's not a particularly well architected one at that.

There's no way to reach consensus, or stasis, in SearchWiki. You can't see the past history of anyone who contributes. Documents don't change, they just get bigger. There's no discussion of the "wiki" document, just the document itself.

The Two Biggest Problems With SearchWiki

There are two major problems with SearchWiki, beyond the fact that it's not a wiki. First, the usability is awful. It's really bad. Users have the visual UI of Google, famous for being clean and clear of disruptions, but if they want to view the markup from other users they have to scroll all the way down to the bottom of the search results page. Then, in many cases, clicking that button just tells you there are no wiki results. It's a terrible user experience.

Second, there's no changing, challenging or hiding anything that's been posted. Try a search for McDonald's, for example. There are two notes - one from some random web designer that's spamming the "wiki" with a link to his page, the other from some joker testing the obscenity filter. Neither can be removed, edited, nothing. We presume that the McDonald's PR department has seen this - but is there anything that even they can do about it? Apparently not. Wait until it's you that has things you don't like appended to the page just one click away from page 1 Google for your name - what are you going to do about it?

This Could Be Big

Wikipedia has a big, engaged community that's worked out some practices and tools to make it all work as well as it does. Google, on the other hand, threw hundreds of millions of people into a forum, called it a wiki and left everyone to their own devices.

Wikis are something very special. They are one of the first types of social software that many business users are introduced to at work. Wikis are used for every kind of collaborative effort you can imagine, from tracking the history of politicians, to sharing best practices for librarians to categorizing every living species on earth. Wikis are not forums for dropping comments, spam and thumbing up your favorite web pages.

There's a whole lot of potential here - but as it is Google SearchWiki is an absolute train wreck. Maybe when larger and larger numbers of people wash over it things will get better. We're not so sure, though.

We're not seeing it yet, but read on for an explanation of what the feature will do and a reaction to the announcement from Ward Cunningham, the man who invented the wiki.

This isn't Google Labs, this isn't a little project off to the side, apparently there's a Google Search Wiki team and they have access to the primary search results page. We expect this to be a very big deal.

Reaction from the Inventor of the Wiki

We asked Ward Cunningham, inventor of the wiki, what he thought about Google Search Wiki. This was his first reaction.

I think it looks pretty sharp. It's simple and powerful - it will respond well to scale. I'm surprised that they called it a wiki. When I heard they wouldn't call a wiki a wiki [Jotspot was renamed Google Sites -ed.], then I decided I wouldn't call my searches Googles. Now that they are calling a wiki a wiki, I guess I'll call my searches Googles again....or should I call them wikis?

I can't tell if they have a wiki there or not, it might just be a forum. Collectively editing thoughts is what leads to the unique wiki behavior and I didn't see that demonstrated in the video.

They are going to get a lot of data. They obviously have the ability to wield information, let's just hope that we will all benefit. I don't think it's obvious that we all will benefit - but I guess I have enough trust in the behavior of a large number of people.

Photo of Cunningham by Joi Ito

It is not clear if Google will consider these changes when it calculates its overall search results, though we assume that Google will surely collect this data and use it in some form or another.

Google hinted at this SearchWiki experiment in a blog post from August and rumors about a digg-style Google Search interface have floated around the Internet for much longer. Google has always released certain experiments to a small sub-set of its users.

However, as Alex Chitu points out, everybody can see a trace of SearchWiki by appending "&swm=2" to the URL of a search results page. This leads us to believe that Google might be planning for a wider rollout of this feature in the near future.

If you would like to see this new functionality in action, Justin Hileman recorded a short screencast that demonstrates these experimental features.

As with most Semantic Web apps, it's a little difficult to describe what Swirrl is. On its homepage Swirrl is said to be "like a wiki, but better." The further explanation is that it's a web application that "allows your team to store, share, edit and analyze information." Basically its a data collaboration app. The main feature of Swirrl is a wiki interface, for editing web pages. But it also has spreadsheet and database functionality too.

Swirrl is focused on business use, rather than consumer use. The business model for Swirrl is premium accounts, from $24 to $198 per month. There is however a free version, which we played with to find out what Swirrl does.

Company rep Bill Roberts explained the purpose of Swirrl:

"We're aiming to lower the bar for efficient sharing and re-use of information in an organisation, to try to find the middle ground between individuals with their own copies of spreadsheets (easy, but poor for collaboration) and complex database systems (good collaboration, but big investment needed and can be inflexible in the face of change)."

Roberts went on to outline how Swirrl is using RDF to achieve this type of "middle ground" business collaboration:

"...we were looking for a lightweight flexible way to put some sort of a data model behind a collection of information, so it can be exchanged and combined in meaningful ways. After some early prototypes using a variety of approaches, we settled on RDF."

According to Roberts, using RDF "behind the scenes" was the best way for Swirrl to enable data collaboration inside and outside an organization. "Our main aim is to improve collaboration amongst a group of colleagues", said Roberts, "but of course exchanging information with the 'outside world' is important, and therefore it makes sense to use a standard way of representing data and it's structure."

Initial Tests

In our tests, it was difficult to use Swirrl. The idea is that users will be entering semantic mark-up, without necessarily knowing they're doing it. The presence of RDF can be glimpsed in the user interface, with references to 'Statements', 'Things', 'Properties', 'Types'. However the problem for ordinary users of this app is that those aren't necessarily intuitive concepts, when using a Web UI with text fields for input. We also tried uploading a couple of spreadsheets, but got errors such as "The file was improperly formatted" that had no further explanation. This may be because the app is so new that there are a few bugs around.

To be fair, using Swirrl becomes clearer when you view the help files. So we can imagine that with a bit of training, business users would get used to the system. When they do, users may start to appreciate the concept of entering semantic meaning into a spreadsheet-like application. Provided they can get past what looks to be a relatively steep learning curve. For businesses, the potential value is in linking this data with external data sets in the future.

We think it's too early to judge how good Swirrl is, but it's definitely worth highlighting to our readers as an example of a commercial RDF Semantic Web app. They do exist! Let us know in the comments what you think of Swirrl, and whether you can see it being used in a business setting.

Mememoir is a completely new development and as of now, its only deployment is in the form of the WikiGenes wiki. Both Mememoir and Wikigenes, a database of literature about genetic information, were created by Robert Hoffmann, a fellow at Society in Science in Switzerland and a visiting scientist at MIT.

For scientists in academia, publications are the lifeblood of their careers. Having published in a wiki is not going to persuade a tenure track committee anytime soon, but the systems that Mememoir puts in place might just make those contributions stand out a bit more. Besides attribution, Mememoir also gives its users the ability to rates authors and their contributions.

The developers are still looking at their options for possibly open-sourcing the code behind Mememoir. As Robert Hoffmann pointed out to us, the project will look at its options at a later time and is mostly focused on running the Wikigenes project for now.

WikiGenes

The information in WikiGenes itself was based on iHop, another project by Hoffman (and not the infamous chain of pancake houses). The idea behind iHop is that information about a single gene can often be dispersed over hundreds of different academic papers, which makes finding and synthesizing all this data extremely hard. IHop used algorithms to parse all this information and bring it together in one database, which was then used to seed WikiGenes.

According to Hoffmann, the idea behind WikiGenes is that it will combat this dispersal of information in the first place, as scientists can enter their research results into the database directly.

Trust and Authorship

WikiTrust, which rates authors on Wikipedia according to an algorithm is trying to do something similar for all of the Wikipedia, but Mememoir takes this to a more personal level. Both systems are, of course, potentially fraught with problems, but it will be interesting to see if scientists will warm up to the wiki model.

We would really like to see Hoffmann and his team open up the code to Mememoir, as the wiki itself is a highly capable piece of code that looks flexible enough to power any kind of wiki - academic or not. In testing it, it turned out one of the easiest to use wikis we have seen so far and it could surely benefit a lot of different projects in the long run. If you would like to see it in action, the project has create a short screen-cast that you can see here.

Also, with the addition of the SharePoint connector, Microsoft's well-known collaboration and document sharing platform gets a big dose of Enterprise 2.0 goodness, which is sure to please the end users. However, Confluence makes I.T. happy too, thanks to their inclusion of tools - like LDAP integration and administratively controlled permissions - that are designed just for the needs of the enterprise.

The Confluence Office Connector provides seamless integration between their enterprise wiki and Microsoft Office. Users can now edit the wiki in Microsoft Word...and even Microsoft Excel or PowerPoint, too. The experience for the end user is intuitive; they simply open a document, make a change, and click "Save" just like they already know how to do. There's no big learning curve here which means users are more likely to adopt the technology instead of relying on their old methods of managing and sharing files. And since those older methods are likely to have been either via network file shares or as inbox-clogging emails, the Confluence solution can help I.T. transition everyone to SharePoint while also helping in the fight against email overload.

With the Connector deployed within Team Sites, wiki editing is finally easy and that alone make it a vast improvement upon the wiki that's provided with SharePoint out of the box.

SharePoint Connector

Originally released in beta form to a limited number of testers back in 2007, today Confluence's SharePoint Connector is officially available to everyone. Although the company offers a hosted solution as well, most I.T. departments are more likely to integrate the Confluence deployable software with SharePoint server instead (or other systems via the API) to build upon the solutions they already use in house.

The companies that have already adopted Confluence include several big names that you're sure to have heard of: Bank of America, Sun, Adobe, Cisco, IBM, SAP, Intel, Seagate, E*Trade, Citigroup, Microsoft, EMC - the list goes on and on, a veritable "who's who" of the world's top enterprises. In total, there are over 6000 enterprises currently using Confluence today, yet the pricing still makes it easy enough for even smaller companies to consider the software, with solutions that begin at $1200 for 25 users (or $600 for academic institutions.)

Learn More

To learn more about the new Office Connector and see it action, check out this video from Atlassian:

Authorship/Identity

Knol puts a lot of emphasis on authorship and, somewhat akin to Amazon's "Real Name" scheme, authors can validate their identity on Knol through either a credit card or phone number.

The default setting for every Knol is "moderated collaboration." In this mode, anybody with a Google account can suggest changes to an knol, but the author has to accept these changes before they go live.

Authors can also invite others to contribute to their articles and given them the same rights as the original author.

There is also an option for authors to write a short bio of themselves in Knol. While this is interesting here, it will be even more interesting to see if Google might start sharing these Knol identities (and maybe even the users' reputation) among more of its properties.

Usage

Setting up a Knol is as easy as clicking the "Write a Knol" button. The text editor, too, is pretty straightforward, especially in the face of the often cryptic mark-up language most wikis use.

Knol uses a rich text editor, which presents users with all the typical editing functions, including basic formatting options, links (all set to 'nonfollow'), and the ability to add references.

As of now, you can not embed any videos or other content, except for the New Yorker Cartoons that Google incensed for this project for reasons only Google knows.

Users who don't want to write their own articles can review and rate knols. There is also an option to leave comments on every knol.

Creative Commons

Users can choose between three licenses for their articles, the Creative Commons Attribution License, the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial License, and an "All Rights Reserved" license. The Attribution license is the default setting. Users can chose a different license for every knol.

Advertising

Authors on Knol can enter their AdSense data into Knol. Besides the cut Google already takes from the advertising through AdSense anyway, authors will get the regular AdSense payout for every click on an ad. This seems like a smart way to reward users who write the best (or most popular) content, while still making money for Google.

In the competition with Wikipedia, this might mean that some authors could divert their attention from editing Wikipedia articles to Knol. However, the question will also be if spammers can find a way of abusing this.

New Yorker Cartoons?

While there is no option to embed any videos or other content into the site, authors can embed cartoons from the New Yorker. This is done through a rather cumbersome process where users have to first search for a cartoon in the New Yorker store and then enter the ID number of the cartoon into Knol. Why Google chose the New Yorker's cartoon archive for this is anybody's guess, but chances are that Google will announce more content partnerships in the near future.

Is Google Going After Wikipedia?

Given how often Wikipedia results appear as Google's top results, it would make sense for Google to look at this and decide to start its own competitor. By incentivizing authors through AdSense and by giving its users simple, but powerful tools to start their articles, Google might just be on the right track. While Google keeps reiterating that Knol is not meant to compete with Wikipedia, it's hard to see how that wouldn't be the case.

Knol, of course, has far fewer articles now than Wikipedia, but as it grows, it will be interesting to watch if Google is going to give preference to its own pages over the Wikipedia results. After all, Knol carries Google advertising and Wikipedia doesn't, so Google would clearly have an incentive in doing so, though the potential public outcry if Google would try to do this might prevent them from even attempting it.

Yahoo's Product Strategy

There's been a lot of hand wringing in the media lately about Yahoo's rejection of Microsoft's takeover bid. Most of the coverage has focused on the (very serious) financial and people issues that Yahoo! CEO Jerry Yang is now facing. But this week RWW focused on the impact on Yahoo's product line. Yahoo's key properties remain yahoo.com, email, myyahoo, and even Answers can be considered special. In short, content is what continues to drive Yahoo and those core properties are still enormously popular. It's just a shame Yahoo got bumped out of the way in social networking and online video -- two high growth content segments in recent times. Click through to read our recommendations for Yahoo.

See also: Yahoo Clings to Its Leading Web "Starting Points"

Firefox 3 Sets Download 'Record'

This week Firefox set out to break a record for most downloads in a 24-hour period. It surpassed the 5 million download mark it set out to meet well within the time limit - and ended up with 10.1 million downloads! We polled our readers: are you using Firefox 3? Do you plan to upgrade? Here are the results:

See also: Get Firefox and Vuze is Another Good Download

Wiki Providers Come Together to Offer Universal Edit Button

Leave it to people in the wiki market to know how to collaborate. Nearly 20 different wiki providers have teamed up to offer a new Firefox extension that will notify users whenever they are on a page that is publicly editable, using a standard icon that sits in the same place the RSS autodiscovery icon appears. Clicking on the icon (img. on the left) will take you to that page's editing interface. It's a great little idea that could help breath new life into the wiki community. We would love to see the extension become a standard part of Firefox.

Loopt: Another Mobile Contender

Loopt is the third location aware mobile social network to become available for the majority of U.S. smartphones . It joins fellow competitors Whrrl and Brightkite, both of which have already started to gain traction (see our coverage of Brightkite here). However, this is not a market where the first one to debut on the smartphone will be the ultimate winner. Instead, in the wild west of the mobile social networks, the key will be adoption. This is an area where Loopt is making headway, having recently announced deals with all the major U.S. carriers and support for Blackberry smartphones.

See also: Fring API Could Shake Up the Mobile Web and Mobile Banking on the Rise

SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY

Web Trends

11 Search Trends That May Disrupt Google

Bernard Lunn's first post for ReadWriteWeb (nearly a year ago) started with the premise that search was "game over", that Google had won and the only opportunity left was (re)search - i.e. what one does after the basic search. Unfortunately, none of the search start-ups since then has made a dent in Google's relentless march towards search market dominance. In this article, we outline 11 search trends that may change that.

Info Overload: The Problem & Solution

Information overload is no longer a joke. For those who suffered with this affliction, it never was, but now that there are real numbers attached to the problem, it has finally prompted companies to take action. Those numbers come from a recent study by a research company called Basex and they are to the tune of $650 billion in wasted productivity. Ironically, the time wasted comes from use of applications and technologies that are supposed to make workers more productive. Unfortunately, they seem to have the opposite effect.

Learning from Flickr's Co-founders on Their Way Out of Yahoo

In June 2005 Yahoo! acquired upstart Canadian photosharing web site Flickr and the web hasn't been the same since. Yahoo, on the other hand, didn't change nearly as much as everyone expected it to. Pre-CEO Jerry Yang told then-Business 2.0 writer Erick Schonfeld six months after the deal "I look at Flickr with envy, it feels like where the Web is going." Flickr co-founders Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield have now cashed out and officially left the company. Though Yahoo! doesn't appear to have internalized many of the lessons of Flickr, it's not too late for the rest of us to look at those same key lessons for inspiration in our work on the web.

See also: 72Photos Offers a New, Sleek Alternative to Flickr

Why IM Interoperability May Just be a Dream

Interoperability between instant messaging (IM) clients is something a lot of users have wished for. More specifically, we wish it was standard and provided right out of the box instead of having to turn to third parties such as Adium, Digsby, Trillian, or Pidgin. Yet there seems to be a problem with the concept of interoperability for the companies of the more popular IM clients.

Also see the results of our poll on IM clients:

Note: 3 IM clients were added belatedly to the poll, due to demand in the comments of our post. Therefore the numbers for Pidgin, Miranda, and Apple's iChat are under-represented.

People in Tech: Brad Feld, Foundry Group

MIT Alumni, technologist, venture capitalist, marathon runner, Colorado dweller, thinker, blogger, and all around super human, Brad Feld (LinkedIn, Twitter) has made a huge impact on startups. With posts on his personal blog, Feld Thoughts, and on Ask The VC (a must read for anyone interested in venture funding) Feld has played a major roll in lifting the curtain on the traditionally mysterious venture process. We recently caught up with him for a quick interview.

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

Finally, check out the latest episode of RWW Live, in which Sean Ammirati from ReadWriteTalk, Richard MacManus from ReadWriteWeb, Steve O’Hear from Last100 and Charles Knight from AltSearchEngines discuss a number of big events over the last week.

That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

A Great Music Wiki

Sites like Last.fm, Imeem, Myspace, iLike, and more are limited when it comes to music. There's only so much information these sites give about music genres and music as a whole. Their only purpose is to promote material rather an educate the masses on other areas of music outside of just artists and the most popular songs out. WikiAudio does the exact opposite. There's a host of educational information about music and the production of it. The site offers a range of information about the jargon that only serious musicians would use and understand.

Conceived by Bill Turner and co-founded by Lathan Hodge, WikiAudio is essentially one enormous wiki on music. However, it's not about artist. The wiki's sole focus is the "art and science of anything audio or sound related". At WikiAudio you can learn about a new recording technique, build an API preamp from scratch, get tips on how to use features in music production software, and a host of other great things. Using the site is the same as using any other wiki. You just type in what you're looking for to get the information. Though it's necessary to sign-up in order to create or modify a new article or tutorial, registration wasn't necessary for browsing the site and accessing the majority of the site's features.

Education Meets Social Media

WikiAudio does a great job of combining both social networking and "Wiki" landscapes to create a hybrid that incorporates articles, videos, audio files, tutorials, user profiles, forums, blogs, RSS feeds, and more. Producers, musicians, and music majors will find WikiAudio to be a candy store full of free and useful sweets. There are plenty of tutorials available and veterans of audio production are encourage to help the beginners of the site by creating tutorials of their personal productions and techniques.