Jimmy Z

Wikia has unveiled Openserving.com, a new collaborative blogging platform based around Open Source principles. Anybody can start a new collaborative blogging site, centered on any topic, and the community contributes their expertise on that subject. The individual that initiates and sets up the site gets 100% of any Ad revenue that comes from visitors to the site.

I signed up for an Openserving site this afternoon. I’m still waiting for an email that will be sent when my site goes live. I’ll post an update when my new site is up.

Wiki Component: It appears from the tour that users will be able to edit pages. I’m not sure how this will work exactly, but the “discuss this page” and “edit” links seen at the top of the screen lead to believe that pages will will have wiki-style read/write.

Drupal Component: Openserving sites are built around community, much like drupal-powered sites. Openserving may be a good platform for college clubs and organizations.

Digg Component: Openserving has followed the Digg model for article and comment voting. Articles will be featured on the front page if they receive a lot of votes. This will hopefully motivate users to write quality content so that their content will be promoted to the front page.

The Openserving announcement was worthy of a mention on Techcrunch, which which has given a little more insight on Wikia’s business model behind Openserving.

“The main thing we’re looking for is that they drive traffic back to Wikia but we’re not just thinking of any link back to the home page, but a content-relevant link,” [Jimmy] Wales said.

One doubt I have for this project is that users might not contribute to a site’s content if they know someone else is going to be receiving adsense revenue for their content. Will anyone write quality content for someone else’s gains? Or would they rather publish it to their own blog?

Another doubt I have is that many of the sites will reach a critical mass to where an article voting model will become relevant. I hope the sites are able to get some traction and the world will benefit from high-quality content sites.

I’ll post an update as soon as I have access to my account, and have a site set up.