Wikia Offers Free Web-hosting

Wikia, Inc., provider of community resources for building free content, has announced OpenServing, the next step in founder and chairman Jimmy Wales’ vision for community-centered content and computing.
Wikia’s OpenServing gives away hosting services and 100 percent of ad revenues to Wikia partners, providing entrepreneurial business models to bloggers and web site owners.

Wales said, “Social change has accelerated beyond the original Wikipedia concept of six years ago. People are rapidly adopting new conventions for working together to do great things, and Wikia is a major beneficiary of that trend. OpenServing is the next phase of this experiment. 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’s OpenServing extends the essence of the open source model — free software and content — to all aspects of web-based computing. OpenServing offers — Free software, bandwidth, storage, computing power, content over the Internet, and 100 percent of the ad inventory and revenue to bloggers and website owners who partner with Wikia.

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By tapping Wikia’s OpenServing utility, anyone can set up and maintain their own collaborative content project for news and opinions for free.

To launch OpenServing, Wikia is offering technology from recently-acquired ArmchairGM.com as the first of hundreds of freely licensed software packages to be hosted in the near future. Through a sign-up process on www.OpenServing.com, users can request their own collaborative blogging site on any topic, to be hosted for free by Wikia.

“OpenServing is a call-to-action for developers that want to take open source to the next level and we are looking for volunteers to help us install and maintain other open-source software at OpenServing.com,” said Gil Penchina, Wikia’s CEO. “We’ve already witnessed the power of these ideas in action by the thousands of dedicated people contributing to Wikia on a daily basis. We look forward to helping the next wave of brilliant and passionate people get their great ideas off the ground.”

Wikia supports the development of the open source software that runs both Wikipedia and Wikia, as well as thousands of other wiki sites. Among other contributions, Wikia plans to enhance the software with improved usability, spam prevention, and community management.