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.

Yesterday we put a few tweaks and bug fixes live including:

• Near-instant map co-ordinates update for businesses that have edited their address.
• A minor design change to the Bizwiki homepage.
• A more robust profanity filter.
• Easier to understand instructions for the email that is sent when a user has forgotten their password.

We’ll be rolling out more changes and updates in the coming weeks.

So keep sending in your comments and 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.

We are pleased to announce that the US Bizwiki site is now live as an Alpha version.

What this means is that this is an early version of the site that doesn’t contain all the features that are planned for the final version, and some of the features are not fully functional (that’s the way our technical team describes anything that’s not really working properly that they don’t want to be asked to fix yet).

A huge amount of work is going on behind the scenes, but in the meantime having the site up on a publicly accessible website gives us a chance to stress-test the servers and have a few live users try it out from varying locations.

We will invite more users when the site hits the Beta stage, but in the meantime please feel free to browse around the site and hopefully get an idea of the scope of our ambition in launching the US version of the Business Wiki site that anyone can edit – there will be over ten million companies and organisations listed here when we’re finished!

Here’s to an exciting 2009 from everyone at Bizwiki!

Jurga Galvan, Bizwiki’s Social Marketer, will be attending the Search Marketing Expo on November 4 & 5. If you’re going to be at SMX London drop Jurga a note to let her know – comments (at) bizwiki.co.uk.

Bizwiki.co.uk has once again been mentioned in the Telegraph as a great way for small firms to advertise online.

Being asked for advice on how small businesses can promote themselves on the web, Will Critchlow of online marketing firm Distilled, said that listing in free business directories like Bizwiki.co.uk made sense but questioned the return on traditional paid-for directories. Read the full story here.

The story primarily focuses on promoting your website online. Remember that if you have a website you can add it to your Bizwiki listing at no charge. We’ll even show a snippet of your website’s text in the “From the Website” section on your Bizwiki record.

If you don’t have a website yet you can use your Bizwiki listing to advertise your business online. A Bizwiki listing puts your details in front of potential customers by being distributed to some of the UK’s top local search sites. And it’s all FREE.

So sign up now and add as much factual information as you can. See this post for ideas of what type of information to add to your Bizwiki record and this one for tips on getting it approved quickly.

Bizwiki has just launched an exciting new ‘Instant Publishing’ feature. Where previously if you submitted a new company to Bizwiki it would only be publicly available once an editor had verified and approved it, now all submissions will be instantly published on the site and immediately available on Bizwiki to the general public.

In line with our goal of creating a website that is both a comprehensive and reliable resource for the public, these new records will be marked as ‘Awaiting Approval’ until an editor has reviewed them. This lets users know that Bizwiki Editors have not yet checked the information and contact details. Once the submission has been verified and approved that label will be removed and at that point the record will also be distributed to the other sites that Bizwiki powers.

Please note that this update only applies to brand new submissions. Any revision (change) requests will currently still be held for Editor verification and approval.

We’re planning a lot more updates in the coming months and are now powering some of the UK‘s most popular local search sites. More information about submitting to Bizwiki can be found on our FAQ section. And remember, it’s FREE and you can add your website, branches and as much factual information as you want. So submit your company and get listed now!