New Wiki-based Publishing Platform and Social Network Launched

A new "Web 2.0" project founded by Michal Frackowiak, an open source activist, is publicly available now. Wikidot.com is a new Wiki-based publishing platform and a social network targeted mainly at advanced Internet users, content publishers and broadcasters. The service offers many free features and options that should be appealing to these who search for a decent Wiki hosting and should make the "Wiki" philosophy worth learning for these who have not used it before.

"We not only want to allow everyone to create a professional, interactive, fully-featured and independent Wiki website. We want to build a social network of users running their own sites. This distinguishes us from most Wiki or blog providers and takes us closer to social services like MySpace" said Michal Frackowiak.

The original idea behind "Wiki" was to allow easy page editing (using a web browser) and collaboration between authors. The biggest and the most widely recognized Wiki site is Wikipedia -- a free encyclopedia with user-editable content. "What we are offering our users can be described as a »Wikipedia of your own«". On Wikidot.com authors can e.g. create categorized information, invite other members and assign them roles within sites, export and import news feeds, run advanced discussion forums, embed video, images and integrate with other web services and of course collaboratively edit content using the provided tools. Also big emphasis has been put on the infrastructure to create and maintain online communities around individual sites.

"At the moment there are many competing services that allow simple page creation but only a few that offer such advanced features. This is still a niche that we want to fill by providing the cutting-edge web solutions we have always wanted to use ourselves."

The main idea behind Wikidot.com is not to limit creativity. "We try not to tell people what they should do nor what they should write about. They are free to do anything as long as it is legal and complies with our policies." Topics of existing sites include personal homepages, hobby sites, personal workspaces, growing community places, academic projects and software development pages.

Wikidot.com is now tagged as "beta" (as most of the modern "Web 2.0" services) which means occasional problems may occur and new features are being added frequently. But some users already seem to be very pleased with the quality of the new service and the general idea of the site.

After only two weeks of online activity the service already has more than 500 registered users and hosts about 200 independent sites -- and the numbers are growing fast.

Michal Frackowiak is a 28-year old professional web developer and a PhD student at the Polish Academy of Sciences. He lives and works in Torun, Poland.

Wikidot.com is a private project owned and developed exclusively by Michal Frackowiak.