Blue Nile Co-Founder Wades Into Wikis

Ben Elowitz has created successful e-commerce sites for selling luxury diamonds and rubies at Blue Nile Inc., to technology books at Fatbrain.com. Now he's turning his entrepreneurial zeal to the create-your-own wiki business with the social networking start-up Wetpaint Inc.

The free hosted wiki site launched in June, but CEO and cofounder Elowitz already has a laundry list of features to add. They are spell check, templates, reply notifications, RSS feeds, analytics to count the hits received on each page, Safari Browser support for Macintosh operating systems, and the ability to create custom URLs.

Elowitz said the Seattle startup founded in October 2005 is just trying to make it easy for people to voice their passions online. "We're all about ease of use, and applying that ease of use to help people contribute to the community," he said.

Some think Elowitz has the business skills to make the innovative wiki site a success. "A lot of people say Elowitz has a good track record" for creating winning companies said ThinkEquity Partners LLC analyst Edward Weller.

In the simplest description, a wiki is a Web site jointly written and edited by many people. Since Wetpaint launched in June, there's been interest from hospitals and others who want to build community around their brand.

Wetpaint is in discussions with several companies about creating sites for them to interact with customers. One recently launched by the cellular handset company HTC, which create white label handsets branded by various networks and other companies.

Companies want to create two-way communication with customers, Elowitz said. "The most innovative companies recognize that their customers are already talking about them online -- and their best option is to join in the conversation rather than sit on the sidelines," he said.

Take the the wiki site author Dan Burstein created, for example. Burstein wrote a book called the "Secrets of the Code," a collection of essays and papers related to theories expressed in the "DaVinci Code" book. He wanted to open the content to fans and let them add additional thoughts, theories and information.

Wikis for hospitals creates an interesting opportunity to blend academic and patent experience into one site. A hospital wiki could create a page for cancer and then list links to academic or 'official' sources of information about the different types of diseases. Then in true wiki style, patients or family of patients could add their own information talking about what to expect with the various treatments from firsthand experience. The wiki cancer" is an example of this approach.

The behind-the-scenes technology that enables Wetpaint's "three steps to create your own" wiki sits on a Representational State Transfer (REST) architecture running on the Linux open-source operating system and built on a service oriented architecture (SOA) platform. The wiki user sees Web pages built on a combination of JavaScript and AJAX with XML on an API layer to support the site.

The site uses Google AdSense to offset hosting and development costs. Elowitz says the goal is to leverage advertiser support in order to keep the service free and remove barriers for adoption.

Consumers are warming up to wikis, too. Wikia Inc., the company founded by Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia, launched a worldwide travel site on Monday. World Wikia offers city guides for locations from San Francisco to New Orleans to London.

For example, romanchurches.wikia already includes nearly 250 articles examining the architecture, art and history of churches in Rome. Wikipedia has become the 17the most-trafficked site on the Web, according to Web traffic research firm Alexa.