Jeff Clavier's Software Only: Wikio opens its door to 5,000 beta users

April 03, 2006

Wikio opens its door to 5,000 beta users

Not to be mixed up with Wikia, Jimmy Wales’ new company, Wikio is the new startup of another Internet entrepreneur, Pierre Chappaz. Pierre is famous in France and Europe for having founded and developed Kelkoo – a European shopping comparison engine – to a half-billion USD exit to Yahoo a couple of years ago. After taking a year off, Pierre joined Index Ventures (the new star VC firm in Europe) as an EIR, and started Wikio – which has now a dozen developers and editors.

What is Wikio ? Topix.net meets Digg meets Memeorandum with a zest of Wink – sort of. And all in French – for now. The private beta-site just opened last night to 5,000 members of the “Francosphere”, but has an ambition to launch throughout Europe. No decision has been made regarding a US version according to Pierre, who has bootstrapped the development to date. Like so many consumer Internet plays, the idea of Wikio came about because existing tools: Google News, Technorati, etc. did not provide homogeneous search across blogs and traditional news, offering correlation between stories and the ability for users to comment and contribute.

Wikio today aggregates stories from 10,000 sources (in French), eventually growing to 50,000 across European languages. Blogs and traditional news outlets are manually selected, reviewed and classified by a team of editors based on quality and content. Upon reception of a story, the system is extracting semantic elements that will be used to correlate stories automatically, as well as generate topical tags. At least a portion of the tags are organized in a comprehensive taxonomy – not clear how this will scale, but the blend of folksonomy/taxonomy seems to work well.

The user interface provides a powerful navigation: top categories (Economy, Business, Technology, etc.), tags, most recent, most relevant to a topic and most popular. The popularity comes from a Digg-like voting system that allows readers to vote for a given story. Searching for a given keyword either delivers a straight keyword search or if the keyword matches an existing category or tag, displays the “landing page” for that keyword. In the latter case, it is also possible to restrict the scope of a search to a level of the taxonomy.

Beyond voting, users can comment on a story as well as contribute one through a standard blog-like interface.

I have to play more with it, but I find the service full of good ideas – bringing the strength of many services I use every day in a single one.

There are questions about how different Wikio is from Google News, Technorati, Digg, Wink, etc. Here are a few thoughts:

First, as I just wrote, it integrates feautures from all the above, making it more powerful.
Second, and this is more a business issue, Wikio might well decide to remain in Europe and cater to local language requirements that are traditionally not always well served by US companies.
Third, Wikio is an interesting mix of editorial selection, user generated voting and content, on top of a unique blend between taxonomies and folksonomies.

You can register for access to the beta site here, and read more about the service on the Wikio blog. And if you really want to take a look, leave a comment, I am sure that Pierre will arrange a few more beta accesses.

Almost forgot: I have no financial interest in Wikio, but I am delighted to write about a French startup for once.

More:

Pictures (clicking on them will blow them up): the first one shows the wikio home page, the second shows Web 2.0 related topics, and the third shows the publication interface.
And of course, TechCrunch has an extensive review – en francais dans le texte :-)
Actually, Ouriel has also pointed me to the English version of his post (thanks).

Tags: wikio