wikia

Wikia's future lies in 'second screen' content

Wikia is on a tear. But when this company's wikis start paying attention to the world around you, they're really going to take off.

Traffic for the topic-specific wiki platform grew 50 percent last year to 851 million page views a month, Wikia CEO Craig Palmer told me yesterday.

The traffic growth, he says, mostly comes from game and entertainment sites. Wikia is stealing growth from IGN and has hired two execs from there as well. Hilary Goldstein, former editor in chief of IGN Games, is now Wikia's gaming category manager. Eric Moro was editor in chief … Read more

How to start your own wiki

Wikis are great sites dedicated to either a specific topic or collection of topics. Sometimes you may come across that your niche hobby or interest isn't well-represented in the wiki community. Fortunately, you can remedy this by creating your own, and then let other users across the Web edit the wiki to help you out. Follow these steps to get started:

1. Open a Web browser to Wikia.com.

2. Near the top there will be a Create Wiki button, click on it.

3. Pick a name for your wiki, followed by a Web address. The Web address cannot … Read more

Season premiere floods 'Lost' fan wiki

Unless you've been hiding under a rock, you probably know that the final season of sci-fi-action-adventure-drama series "Lost" premiered on Tuesday--so what happened over at one of its most popular fan sites? CNET hit up the team behind Wikia, which hosts and operates "Lost" fan encyclopedia Lostpedia, for some details on exactly what their traffic was like right after the two-hour episode aired.

In short: It wasn't the site's biggest night, but it was still impressive.

Sixty new pages were added to the wiki in the wake of the finale, additions that night … Read more

Buzz Out Loud 943: Confickrolled

The whole world was fooled into fearing a huge storm of worminess that never happened. Was it because we were prepared or because it really wasn't that big of a deal at all? We also avoid most of the April Foolery and talk some Nehalem processors and BlackBerry App World.

Listen now: Download today's podcast EPISODE 943

Want April Fool’s updates? Go watch Loaded. http://cnettv.cnet.com/2001-1_53-50005651.html

Web 2.0 Expo http://news.cnet.com/webware/

Live blog: Countdown to Conficker http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-10208722-83.html http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2009/04/conficker-war-r.html… Read more

CNET News Daily Podcast: Will Conficker be Y2K redux?

The clock is ticking down on Conflicker, an Internet worm that's making the rounds in various incarnations and is getting more sophisticated. It could be huge, or it could be nada. It's all part of a guessing game and we may know more tomorrow. CNET News' Elinor Mills has the latest. Listen now: Download today's podcast Wales giving up on Wikia search

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Wales giving up on Wikia Search

Wikia is announcing on Tuesday that it is closing the Wikia Search product. The service was intended to be a user-generated search engine, through which users could influence the rankings of results for all other users.

Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikia and driving force behind Wikia Search, fully expected the development of Wikia Search to be a "long-term project." The current economy, however, has forced him to "reassess everything," and "do what we need to do to get to profitabililty."

Wikia Search was not on the right trajectory. "This one is too far … Read more

Wikia Search having problems

It looks like there's a bit of trouble over at Wikia Search this morning.

The search portal, run by Wikia, the for-profit wiki service co-founded by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, was returning "Service Unavailable" error messages about 10 percent of the time, during a test I ran on both Firefox and Safari.

The rest of the time, the service seemed to be working mainly as it should, though from time to time, the search page would only partially load.

The error message would return when loading the Wikia Search home page, and read, "Error 503 Service … Read more

Layoffs at Jimmy Wales' Wikia?

It's not surprising, considering that everybody else is doing it.

Valleywag reports that Wikia, the for-profit wiki software and search start-up created by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, has laid off about a third of its 43-person workforce--or 12 to 13 employees.

A Wikia representative was not immediately available to confirm.

The company, formerly known as Wikicities, has big-name investor backing, but it doesn't appear to have pulled in any funding for nearly two years. It raised a Series B round of an undisclosed size from Amazon.com in December 2006; previously, the company had taken a $4 million … Read more

New Wikia interface enables search-results apps

Wikia Search has released an interface called Wikia Intelligent Search Extensions (WISE) that lets sites build their search results into custom-made applications.

WISE launched Wednesday with a number of partners offering sample "WISEapps," including AccuWeather, Digg, and The Washington Post, which built an application that can show its news articles directly within search results.

The technology is similar to Yahoo's SearchMonkey.

Incorporating the collaborative Wiki philosophy, Wikia Search lets people edit search results, including the order in which results appear. Google has begun a much narrower experiment that lets people move, add, and remove search results, but … Read more