Jimbo [I find it hard to call him that] gives an update on Wikipedia. The English version will pass 500,000 articles today. 350,000 hierarchical categories. The site has passd USAToday.com and the NYT.com. It’s so popular, he says, because it addresses the original deam of the Internet: People sharing information freely.

WikiCities.com is Jimbo’s new for-profit company, expanding the Wikipedia’s social model, “the social computing successor of free home pages.” 170 communities have formed in 3 months. (Communities are built around topics, it seems.)

He views Wikipedia as a social innovation that will spread to other areas besides encyclopedias. “Social collaboration is the future of the Net.” [Technorati tags: etech wikipedia]

Categories: Uncategorized dw