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I am writing about what happens in our startup week by week...
This week it is all about communication with the world outside. When a new product is pushed on the market, all you want is the publicity, a lot of publicity. Well, it sounds easy and everybody around you knows "one good way how to do it", so you hear things like: do Twitter, do blog, do Facebook, do Youtube, do Flickr, etc. Everybody is a kind of PR specialist, those entire information dance in your head and you feel you are the only one not being aware of the "perfect plan for spreading the buzz". Stupid me, stupid me!
After you do some broadcasting and make a couple of mistakes, somehow the buzz starts. Most probably your project needs to have a "wow, this is cool" factor, and if it does, the buzz starts. Anonymous people start to talk about you: bloggers blog, Facebookers network, Twitters tweet, media guys call and schedule interviews - in one word, your CEO time is booked and communication becomes your only daily task, at least for some time. Of course, the night is long, so the other tasks are scheduled for 5 p.m. tea time and after. I love tea time!
Every day you get something new to communicate to the world outside and that makes your life interesting and fun. I love my tea time, but I also love to talk about our startup and I enjoy every moment of it.
On Monday I read one post about our project on TechPluto, blog about startup reviews. Mr. Sharma who wrote the article took his time to visit our portal, played a bit with it and wrote a really constructive article about us. I am using this opportunity to say thanks and TechPluto will be on my RSS radar from now on.
At one point the article quotes: "if Bumblehood wants to be yet another competitor to these monstrous services (Wikipedia and Yelp) then the chances of being the Next Big Thing are bleak". Wow, just comparing Bumblehood to Wikipedia is something which makes me dizzy. OK, the author does have a negative opinion when comparing David and Goliath, but that is usual and I would probably do the same thing at the moment (the Google guys were also outsiders in the field which was "already invented", right?). But comparing us to Wikipedia shows where we are heading with our goals and what we want to achieve. And I am proud of it.
So, why Bumblehood is NOT Wikipedia?
I have to bow to the Wikipedia project all the way to the ground, and I have been doing that for years already. My friends know how big a fan of Wikipedia I am and how much I have learned from that project. It is probably the best thing that happened to the Internet lately (with all respect to the others). But no, Bumblehood does not want to compete with Wikipedia, we don't even dream about it. Bumblehood is simply different from Wikipedia.
And I will tell you why:
1) Encyclopedia style (Wikipedia) vs. Local guide for places and businesses (Bumblehood)
Targeting particular groups of users on Internet has always been the holy grail of web visibility, buzz, and search engine optimization. Wikipedia made it successfully and nowadays it became de facto the place where to look for the facts and the details about any topic human can think of. But it is NOT a guide!
Webster world dictionary defines a guide as "a book giving instructions in the elements of some subject", while encyclopedia is defined as "a book giving information on all branches of knowledge".
When people travel somewhere, they will not take an encyclopedia with them, but rather take the guide to instruct them about the topic and the neighborhood of the topic they are interested in. The same applies for a person who needs information about particular business or product - he/she will not take an encyclopedia to find a fitness studio in the neighborhood. He/she will rather take a systematically organized guide (yellow pages or something similar).
There are many differences between encyclopedic style of writing and writing for a guide. Anyone who already had an opportunity to travel somewhere knows the difference between the factual texts and guide texts written in personal, interesting and sometimes "spicy" tone. The thing is pretty much the same with any topic described in encyclopedia or guide.
Bumblehood is a travel guide portal and we do not plan to become an encyclopedia.
2) Flat structure (Wikipedia) vs. hierarchically organized structure (Bumblehood)
Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, a flat structure of documents without real hierarchy and neighborhood-connectivity. Bumblehood is a hierarchically organized knowledge base targeting one area of the human activity at the time. While Wikipedia targets all topics in the world, ranging from science to religion and philosophy in a flat, one article topics, Bumblehood tends to structurally organize geo-location knowledge base about any point of interest in the world. So, the flat system without the "neighborhood” component of Wikipedia cannot be the compared to the hierarchical world of Bumblehood.
While some people will say that Wikipedia has categories, organization and hierarchy, I claim (and open discussion about that topic on this blog) that Wikipedia's structural organization is inefficiently set up in later phases of the project and it does not have structural and semantic rules which can guarantee good systematic organization.
Let's take an example: City of Barcelona, the capital of Catalonia (an autonomous community in northeastern Spain) and the second largest city in Spain can be found in English Wikipedia. If we take a look at the categories in which this city is placed we will NOT find category "Cities in Catalonia" nor "Capitals of Spanish Autonomous Communities". Although, if we take Munich, the capital of Bavaria (a state in southern Germany) we WILL find categories "Cities in Bavaria" and "German state capitals".
This example shows ambiguity and incompleteness of the Wikipedia’s categorization system and justifies semantic topic approach used in BumbleMap knowledge base platform. It is just much more powerful and provides better systematical data organization.
3) No local businesses (Encyclopedia) vs. Local business directories (Bumblehood)
Wikipedia does not allow business promotion and most of the businesses are not present on Wikipedia. It is just not something what Wikipedia does. Full stop.
Bumblehood on the other hand takes into account any geo-location in the world, including local businesses. But those businesses are not scattered around, they are systematically and hierarchically organized together with the local guides, providing the full picture about one geo-location (neighborhood, town, region, country).
4) Plain text editor (Wikipedia) vs. full WYSIWYG editor (Bumblehood)
Jimbo Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, decided to run a simple study and found out that "the most active 2% of Wikipedia editors, which is 1400 people, have done 73.4% of all the edits". Let's face it - to edit Wikipedia you have to have the extensive knowledge of a complicated and user-unfriendly markup language which is used to contribute the content. It is not a secret, and although Wikipedia's markup is a very powerful tool, it is just too complicated for a non-experienced user who is used to WYSIWYG environments of modern text editors. Wikipedia's editor seems to be coming from the age of "terminal WordPerfect".
On the other hand, Bumblehood WYSIWYG editor is easy to use - open the document, edit it, see what you are doing and close it when you are done.
Not only that guide content is editable using WYSIWYG editor, but also information about the local businesses, which makes Bumblehood a unique place on Internet. Hopefully our contributing community will appreciate this part. You can check it yourself on Bumblebee testing environment.
5) Non-profit (Wikipedia) vs. for-profit (Bumblehood)
While Wikipedia is a non-profit foundation not allowing any promotional activities and business placements, Bumblehood is a joint stock company. Wikipedia's way has many advantages and I personally love what those guys are doing - who wouldn't support free knowledge distribution. But many obstacles and growth problems which Wikipedia is facing right now (and most probably there will be even more in the future) start to worry many of us.
On the other hand, for-profit companies like Bumblehood, have more possible sources of income which can provide a long term stability and development. I wonder what would have happened to Google, Facebook or YouTube being non-profitable organizations? Their costs are just too high for that model. Let's hope Wikipedia stays for a long, long time.
Although Bumblehood is a for-profit company, we have already put all our content under the Creative Commons license and as long as I am leading this company, the knowledge base we gather will always be free for everyone. This is the dream I strongly believe in.
Do you have anything to say about this topic? Our Forum is open for the discussion from 0 to 24, and you can reach me privately on boro-AT-bumblehood-DOT-com
And why Bumblehood is not Yelp? Stay tuned for my next post.
Posted by Boro Milivojevic on April 16, 2009 --- Permalink --- Tagged in categories: What's up --- Comments on Forum
