A new website called Bizwiki.com has launched across the USA today, promising to change the way local search works by enabling its users to build up the most detailed and up-to-date index of business in the United States.
In a break with traditional Yellow Pages websites, Bizwiki invites business owners and representatives to get involved in adding and improving their records with everything from contact details to prices and opening hours, completely free of charge.
“We put up an early Alpha-version of Bizwiki.com to test it on the web in December 2008, and already traffic levels have grown to several hundred thousand users per month!,†said Bizwiki co-founder Matt Aird. “There is definitely a strong demand for the sort of information a Web 2.0 business site can deliver, and the increasing amount of users on the site provides a compelling motivation for businesses to get involved in adding and editing their listings.â€
“Today’s launch is officially a fully-functional beta, but we already have several hundred thousand pages on the site, with more being added each day. We’ve tried to take ideas and concepts from some of the most successful user-created websites in the world, such as Wikipedia and the Open Directory Project, and improve them to where the ‘anyone can edit’ principles of a wiki can be used in a business-environment. The biggest single difference is probably that our site is built in a consistently structured format, allowing us to rapidly scale-up the amount of information and also give our users an easy way to search the site.â€
The Bizwiki difference:
• It’s free – Unlike many established publishers that charge for inclusion, Bizwiki is free to search, free to edit and free for companies to list on.
• It’s editable – The ‘anyone-can-edit’ approach is a challenge to frequently the out of date records of conventional printed Business Directories.
• It’s a wiki – The wiki approach allows far more depth of information about each business to be compiled than anything conventionally available.
• It’s structured – Bizwiki is built using structured data, allowing reusability of information, bulk updates from chambers of commerce or webspiders, and an easy search experience for users.
Bizwiki was built by industry-veterans with years of business directory and meta-search experience behind them, including Keith Hinde, Matt Aird, Craig Sefton and Arthur Jenkins who between them have helped develop directory and search products for Infospace, local directory publisher Thomson Directories, TradePage and Webcrawler.
To try the new Bizwiki site, or even add and edit a business record, visit http://www.bizwiki.com.
