[Foundation-l] UMP Convention

[David Gerard]

On 05/10/06, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 10/5/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:

> > We're a top-20 website, and the only one that's run on a shoestring.
> > This is barely the beginning.
> > ("Google? ... Oh, yes. We were going to use their ads but their
> > servers couldn't possibly send them fast enough.")

> We've leveled off in terms of growth (it's still there but not at the
> rate it used to be). Unless we come up with something new (a way to
> make commons effectively searchable might be one) we may have pretty
> much reached our natural level of webpresence.


Using the self-selected and inherently bogus Alexa numbers, Wikipedia
is still slowly climbing in page rank and steadily increasing in page
views per million. Are you quite sure about that slowing? Is it the
first derivative or the second derivative that's going down?

(I mention only Wikipedia here, not any other project, because Alexa
goes by domain.)

It feels like the press are only just getting their heads around our existence.


> If that is the case it may be time to look to other areas. Mobile
> phones. Book form. Provideing stock photos and information for non
> profits (and to a degree profits).


I'm not saying that ridiculous growth has been good for us; in fact, I
think it hasn't. en: could certainly do with just a little less of the
public glare, though that's not going to happen - we're way too useful
to the actual readers, and we'll only get better in breadth of
coverage and quality in the areas already covered.

In stock photos: Commons has I understand plans for much better
categorisation. The plans to make categories in MediaWiki work more
like tags will help (if they can ever work around MySQL being
basically crap at it without reworking the entire wiki engine). You
describe Commons to a journalist and they go "oh, like Getty Images?"
and you answer "yep, we're nothing like there yet but we want
something that good." Where "good" means an editor in a hurry can
search Commons, find a pic and slap it in the paper labeled "(c)
Photographer, reusable under cc-by-sa." You would, with a moment's
thought, see just *how much* press editors would love something like
that they don't have to pay Getty Images rates for.


- d.