About Wyki

History

The team behind the Wyki projects have been working with publishers for years, and have built and manage online communities with hundreds of thousands of users. This has created a fascination with how social networking relates to publishing.

We noticed that in practice many magazines and trade journals acted as gathering points for communities. That's why it is often easy to quickly build online communities starting with an existing print title. This made us think about what publications really are...

We believe the future of special interest magazines and trade journals is as online social networks where communities of users, experts and freelance professional writers grow high quality content resources at their core. These networks grow as more Internet users arrive to consume the targeted content and resources made available.

The Wyki team is predominantly based in Queens Park, London.

Wyki Media

The dynamics of publishing have changed forever. What has changed is the community content represented by blogs, forums and other online sources, which is drawing an ever greater share of user attention. It has become difficult for some traditional publishing companies to compete - and now Wikipedia has shown how even challenging publications can be built by an online community, and better.

Wyki Media exists to enable the next step, where communities build the magazines and trade journals of the future. These will exist in the form of social networks growing around content on domains like:
http://classiccar.wyki.com, or
http://tax.wyki.co.uk

Independent authors contribute to wyki sites for any number of reasons. Some for the joy of being published, some to promote their services as experts, and some to drive revenues as freelance writers or content owners.

Wyki sites use a model we have called "Open Publishing". This allows authors who submit content to communities to retain complete copyright and control over their work, to the extent of being able to display advertising on their own content, and retain 100% of the revenues generated.

Many of the functions of traditional publishers are being automated. For example, online accounts like Google AdSense automate the process of acquiring advertising for content so that advertising sales teams are no longer always needed. Wyki sites will enable more individuals to act as publishers themselves, and directly acquire the revenues their work generates.

Wyki Labs

Wyki sites introduce many new technical challenges. For example, how can software select the best content like a human editor? Wyki Labs has solutions to this and many other challenges, some of which will be made available to third parties in the form of APIs and libraries that can be used on other sites.

Examples of Wyki Labs work includes:

• Re-inventing online discussion Traditional threaded discussions seen on forums and threaded comments on sites like YouTube suffer limitations and usability issues that have been solved by Wyki Linear Threading System. Follow our recent patent application here.
• Re-inventing online content editing We believe that the content embedded in Web pages should be editable on the page to provide true WYSIWYG to users. This has involved the development of the VisionX editor. Try clicking here to make this page content editable.
• Software that understands media For example, we have developed software that "looks" inside images to find similar and harmonious photos inside databases. Combined with tagging, this can be used for example to create facilities like Google Similar Images (note: Google's site does not use our technology). This is available for license by image libraries. You can find some open source work we have sponsored in this field on Code Project here.