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Wikia Inc., the for-profit venture from Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, has [announced plans][1] to offer a free online application hosting service. The service will be called Openserving and will officially be available beginning sometime next week, but you can take a tour today.
Openserving will run on an easy-to-use version of the MediaWiki software and seems aimed to compete with other packaged services like Movable Type's TypePad.
Wales announcement comes as part of the ongoing Le Blogs conference in Paris France.
The new hosting promises, according to the announcement, "free software, free bandwidth, free storage, free computing power, free content over the internet," and will give 100 percent of ad revenue generated by the site to the "bloggers and website owners who partner with Wikia."
If you're thinking what's the catch, well there doesn't seem to be one. The only requirement is that the sites link back to Wikia.com which generates its revenue from advertising.
To address the widespread incredulity and curiosity about Wikia's business plan, Wells said in a press release, "we don't have all the business model answers, but we are confident -- as we always have been -- that the wisdom of our community will prevail."
Wikia may not be concerned with revenue at the moment since they recently took four million in funding from private sources and last week Wikia partnered with Amazon for an undisclosed sum.
Interestingly, Amazon has its own low-cost, data storage and website-hosting services, but Wales says that's not part of Wikia's deal with Amazon at the moment. "Potentially," [he tells Reuters][2], "but this is really completely separate"
While back links to Wikia.com may get Wikia some additional traffic and therefore generate more revenue, even Google, king of free internet services, takes its cut of advertising revenue.
By offering everything for free and turning down the established web 2.0 revenue stream of advertising, Wikia has set sail in uncharted waters; we'll be keeping an eye on the service to see how it plays out.
[1]: http://www.wikia.com/wiki/Wikia_unveils_OpenServing
[2]: http://today.reuters.com/news/articleinvesting.aspx?view=CN&symbol=&storyID=2006-12-11T120348Z_01_N11490141_RTRIDST_0_INTERNET-WIKIA.XML&pageNumber=1&WTModLoc=InvArt-C1-ArticlePage1&sz=13 "Reuters on Wikia"
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