Richard MacManus is writing a multi-part story on Yellowikis, An wikipedia approach to open, group edited business listings.
I love the idea…and ask why it doesn’t have tagging and an open API for the data.
I’m looking forward to Richard’s further posts on Yellowikis – the site has been up since January and has very thin data right now. My recommendation – tweak the model (as I mention above) and get the network effect flowing. I will gladly profile it on TechCrunch at that point.
By the way, I forgot to link to Richard’s Web 2.0 Weekly Wrapup for last week. Check it out (and subscribe) here.
are there any open databases of businesses? something like this would get a TON of more use if it already had lots of businesses listed already.
Don’t forget Yellowikis is under a year old, we have no full time employees, no office, not even a telephone. This is just the start of the beginning.
Our “tags” are called “categories” you can add other people’s categories to your information or make up your own. We think “Liberty Hall” – Yellow Pages think “Anarchy and chaos”.
We run on the same platform as Wikipedia (a collection of PHP scrips running on LAMP called MediaWiki)- no API at the moment – just a lot of code and documentation. It is possible to hack and people do clever things with it and there is an very active community of developers to help. An API would be a very good thing for us and Wikipedia.
Brian’s idea of pump priming the database with existing business information was considered but misses the point of collecting information that doesn’t currently exist in any other form – things such as competitors, subsidiaries, languages spoken, opening hours, Skype IDs, email addresses, Geo-codes multi-lingual profiles. Show me a Yellow Pages that can do all that AND is indexable by GYM spiders.
You’ll be able to read more about these issues in the second part of Richard’s article.
In part three I hope Richard will look at how Yellowikis is going to impact on developing countries. When things take off in China, India and Africa. That is where it will get really interesting. I still need to work out how to pay for bandwidth though. Suggestions on a postcard please.