The BizwikiBot web crawler has been extremely busy recently, and we’re happy to say we’ve been able to add additional detail to hundreds of thousands of businesses right across America.
Our custom-built BizwikiBot is programmed to perform tasks such as confirming or updating vital contact details and retrieving and processing a short portion of text about companies. As well as adding additional useful content about companies on the site, this is a great help to our human editors in keeping information up to date.
Expect to additional information appearing on over a hundred thousand more company pages over the weeks ahead as BizwikiBot continues its crawling, indexing and sorting of data.
You can add a new company to Bizwiki or add a website to an existing business record and the site will be added to a list for BizwikiBot to spider in its next pass.
What is BizwikiBot?
BizwikiBot is a web crawler programmed to browse the internet in a methodical, automated manner. When visiting sites, BizwikiBot spiders pages and retrieves text as a means of providing up-to-date information about businesses to the many people who use the Bizwiki site.
This automatically spidered information is added to the hand-written content, providing additional detail to the site’s users. Registered users can edit and add to these records, with a goal of providing the public with a more complete picture of each company.
BizwikiBot is designed to be a polite bot, following any instructions from the site’s owners and using the minimum bandwidth and server resources.
If you would like information about managing how BizwikiBot interacts with your site, or need to know how to prevent it accessing certain pages, please see http://www.bizwiki.com/bizwikibot.htm#managing
We hope you find the new content and information useful!
The US Yellow Pages industry’s associations have jointly announced the launch of an opt out phone number look up for your local yellow pages.
Unfortunately it’s not an online form. It’s just a list of phone numbers to call. Still, I suppose it’s a step in the right direction in that it makes it easier to find the opt out numbers.
Go to the search form here and put in your zip code. The site then comes back with the Yellow Page directories that deliver to your area and the number to call if you want to opt out of receiving the printed directory.
I haven’t tried it yet so I have no idea how long you might be on hold. Nor can I confirm it works. From reports such as this one getting them to actually stop delivering the books might not be as easy as making a few calls.
The continuing debate about Yellow Pages opt out/opt in is still on. If the companies will actually honor the opt out requests they receive then this may go some way towards cooling the animosity and frustration that the indiscriminate dumping of the books has created in many households.
There are third party services that offer to do all the calling for you such as this one. Note that in order for them to do this you have to provide them with your personal details such as name and address.
The Canadian Yellow Pages Group is actually leading the way here in that it allows opt out using a - wait for it - dedicated online form (whatever will they think of next?). They also have a number you can call 1-800-268-5637.
In the UK, the Yellow Page publishers don’t even publish the opt out numbers. For Yell it’s 0800 671 444 or your can try using their general contact form. For Thomson Directories it’s 01252 555 555, use their general contact form or email info@thomsonlocal.com. And for BT it’s 0800 800150.
Alternatively try this service that sends a form on your behalf to all three plus the Royal Mail’s Door to Door opt out scheme, The Direct Marketing Association’s opt out scheme and the Mail Preference Service. Sounds good to me. Just be aware that emails can get lost, stuck in the spam filter or simply ignored. If you want to be absolutely sure that you’ll be removed from their distribution list you might have to pick up the phone.
In Australia Telstra’s Sensis allows you to opt out by calling 1800 810 211 or by emailing bookdelivery@sensis.com.au.
According to the New York Times, in a move to tighten up control of sensitive information Wikipedia will soon require approval from an experienced editor before changes to articles about living people are displayed on the site.
In February we reported that Wikipedia was considering just such a move in our post Wikipedia breaks with the tradition of ‘Anything Goes’. They are now going ahead with what is being termed “flagged revisions” which means that any revisions done to articles about living people will not be published instantly but rather be flagged and reviewed by an experienced editor. If it’s approved, the revision will then be published and visible to the general public.
This is very similar to the way Bizwiki works, with editors involved in the approval and moderation of new company data and business information. The difference is that we do this for all records, rather than just some, because we believe it’s vitally important that users can trust and rely on the site’s information.
With people from school children to journalists to CEO’s citing Wikipedia as a reference, ensuring the accuracy of the articles has to be paramount. Mr. Wales, Wikipedia’s founder, obviously agrees and is taking steps towards protecting both Wikipedia’s information and its reputation.
This additional step in the process is sure to be controversial as it means editing these articles will no longer be instant, and the division of experienced volunteer editors from new users is a move away from treating everyone as equal contributors of knowledge. However, I see it more as a necessary maturation of their approach as more and more people are relying on their site for information.
If anything, my prediction is that this trend will continue, with Wikipedia gradually tightening up the control of other sections of the site. With the breadth of articles on Wikipedia now being so huge they can afford to slow down the acceptance of new information for the sake of accuracy and honesty.
Taking another huge step in the right direction AT&T is looking to begin phasing out the distribution of its printed white pages phone book. According to an article by WSB News, the company has requested permission from the Georgia Public Service Commission to stop delivering white pages to homes in Atlanta, Chamblee, Decatur, Doraville, Dunwoody, East Point, Hapeville, Lithonia, Sandy Springs and Tucker. If approved, those areas would not receive phone books from December 2009.
Households in those areas that do want to receive the white pages can opt in. And of course, they are going to continue printing the business white and yellow pages. AT&T have already moved towards a white pages opt-in scheme in other states.
This is fantastic news and definitely a progressive move. In their request to discontinue delivery of the white pages to Altanta metro households, AT&T acknowledged the environmental benefits of no longer publishing 876,000+ phone books for the area per year, most of which probably became doorstops, booster seats, impromptu stools and gently leaning towers gathering dust in some forgotten corner.
Hopefully we will continue to see more and more areas moved over to an opt in scheme for phone book delivery. Some people do use printed phone books and there is no reason why those people shouldn’t be able to receive them. An opt in scheme would work well for everyone (except maybe the publishers looking to sell expensive YP advertising).
A post from last year provides an interesting look at the opt-out debate surrounding business yellow pages and how desperately the industry does not want to allow it to happen. That was in October 2008. Maybe we’re seeing a shift beginning with the white pages, maybe not.
If you like the idea of banning unsolicited white page door drops you can sign the petition over at Ban the Phone Book. Does anyone know if there’s a similar one for Yellow Pages?
Is your Yellow Pages phone book thinner than it used to be? You might not have noticed, but apparently it’s on a diet. The Yellow Page publisher AT&T blames the shrinkage on several factors including (un-surprisingly) online advertising.
According to an article by WWAY, “The 2009-2010 version of the Yellow Pages has 140 pages less than last year’s version, which had 60 pages less than 2007-2008″. That might not sound like a lot of lost ads but when you consider that most of the pages had at least several, if not several dozen, advertisers on them it starts to add up.
It’s no great surprise that instead of paying for an ad in a printed Yellow Pages phone book that will enjoy few, if any, peeks (mine are stacked precariously in the corner awaiting the recycling run) business owners are turning instead to free online advertising. Why pay for what you can get for free?
If you haven’t already gotten your free Bizwiki listing, sign up and add your business now! You can add opening hours, payment types accepted, products, services, specialties, awards won, a special Message from the Company, and of course your contact details and website address. Click here to get started. Feel free to contact us if you have any questions or suggestions.
Since we launched the Beta version of Bizwiki.com last week we have been very pleased with the sheer volume of user registrations and company submissions.
We would like to especially thank Choice Window Tinting Orlando for being the first submission we received, just minutes after the US Beta was launched. We wish you all the best in your business and hope your free listing on Bizwiki.com brings you many new customers.
Most companies submitting their details are taking advantage of the Message from the Company field which is great. That’s your space, go ahead and tell us all about what a fantastic company you have and why we should do business with you. Bizwiki editors do not amend what you place in the Message from the Company field (unless it has obviously not been written on behalf of the company) so feel free to advertise yourself as much as you want.
And don’t forget that your initial submission doesn’t have to be the end. If you would like to add more details to your record you can at any time. Both additions and updates are free so if you forgot to add your toll free number or your website address why not do it now? Please note that our editors review all submissions and updates to ensure accuracy.
It’s early days and we have a lot of new features planned for Bizwiki.com so please feel free to contact us with any suggestions or comments you might have. We’d love to hear from you.
We’re happy to announce that the fully-functional Beta version of Bizwiki.com has launched today, enabling our users to build up the most detailed and up-to-date index of businesses in the United States.
Bizwiki invites everyone from business owners and representatives to customers and consumers to get involved in adding and improving company records of businesses anywhere in the US, with everything from contact details to prices and opening hours, completely free of charge.
Regular readers of our blog will remember that we put up the Alpha-version of Bizwiki.com in December 2008 to test it on the web. Even though it was just a work-in-progress version of the site with limited functionality, traffic levels have already grown to several hundred thousand users per month.
There is definitely a strong demand for the sort of information a community-based Web 2.0 business site can deliver, and the increasing number of users on the site provides a compelling motivation for businesses to get involved in adding and editing their listings.
Today’s launch is officially a fully-functional beta, but we already have several hundred thousand pages on the site, with more being added each day. We’ve tried to take ideas and concepts from some of the most successful user-created websites in the world, such as Wikipedia and the Open Directory Project, and improve them to where the ‘anyone can edit’ principles of a wiki can be used in a business-environment.
More features and functionality are on their way, along with a host of changes and tweaks to improve the service further.
In the meantime, to try the new US Bizwiki site or even add and edit a business record, visit www.bizwiki.com.
The Bizwiki difference:
It’s free – Unlike many established publishers that charge for inclusion, Bizwiki is free to search, free to edit, and free for companies to list on.
It’s editable – The ‘anyone-can-edit’ approach is a challenge to the frequently out-of-date records of traditional printed Business Directories.
It’s a wiki – The wiki approach allows far more depth of information about each business to be compiled than anything conventionally available.
It’s structured – Bizwiki is built using structured data, allowing reusability of information, bulk updates from chambers of commerce or webspiders, and an easy search experience for users.
Now there is a new way to search Bizwiki UK — check out the new Bizwiki iGoogle gadget. You can add the Bizwiki UK gadget to your iGoogle homepage, stick it on your Google toolbar and even embed it into your own website.
The Bizwiki UK gadget was developed by our own Casey Lee and we love it.
Give it a go and tell us what you think. We’ll be developing one for Bizwiki US as well so stay tuned!
The Independent newspaper published an article on Tuesday, 3 February 2009, titled ‘So is Wikipedia cracking up?’ in which Stephen Foley explores the problem of vandalism plaguing certain areas of the online encyclopaedia site, and Wikipedia’s reaction to it.
The article states, ‘Barack Obama’s inauguration day was the final straw for Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia’s founder and visionary-in-chief, who declared that it was time to break with the tradition of “anything goes”.
From now on, he proposes, editing the biography of a living person will be a two-stage process; anyone can still make a revision, but it will have to be flagged as “approved” by someone higher up the Wikipedian food-chain before it goes live on the site. “This sort of nonsense would have been 100 per cent prevented by flagged revisions,” Wales stated.
Of course, apart from the headline itself there is no indication of Wikipedia ‘cracking up’ - it remains a source of information that millions of people around the world are coming to rely on more and more. What we are really seeing here is Wikipedia moving to a more ‘managed’ approach to editing, but even this limited move towards moderation will be a big change to Wikipedia’s former somewhat laissez faire approach in allowing changes to instantly go live.
We have implemented a similar approach in having editors involved in the moderation of new company data and business information here on Bizwiki because as a business site, it’s vitally important that users can trust and rely on information. This does slow the process of adding new records down somewhat, but we believe we’ve still kept the best part of the wiki-model, which is a site made by its users for its users.
In Wikipedia’s case, Reid Priedhorsky, who studies Wikipedia and similar social projects at the University of Minnesota, estimated in a recent paper that the chances of any one visitor seeing a damaged Wikipedia page are about one in 140, as the average time it takes to repair damage is less than three minutes, and even less for heavily tracked pages.
However, the most startling fact about Wikipedia remains how accurate it is, not how inaccurate.
“As a researcher, I’m baffled that it works, but Wikipedia is one of the wonderful things that has happened in the 21st century. Many hands make light work. There are millions of people who edit Wikipedia, and many of them track changes to the pages they are interested in. I have 43 pages on my watchlist, for example, covering subjects I know things about. Any controversial edit is likely to be quickly seen by many people.”
So while we can expect their approach to continue to gradually change and evolve, long live Wikipedia and their brave goal of enabling users to create the largest encyclopaedia of knowledge the world has ever known.
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