Biojack - A Free-for-All Biography Wiki Joins the Social Web

Biojack (www.biojack.com), the latest entry to the growing social software community, launches a free-for-all biography wiki. The intention is to provide a service where biographical information on both famous people and the ordinary netizen can easily be accessed. Users can post biographical articles in prose, a list of profile entries, or a collection of links to blogs, social network profiles, FOAF files, genealogy site entries, photo albums and many others.

(PRWEB) October 23, 2004 -- For the past couple of years, social networks like Friendster, LinkedIn and Orkut have been in the limelight of media attention as it draws Netizens into an evolving model of the World Wide Web as a network of people. Using these services, any Netizen can create a profile containing personal information and share it with friends and the public.

While the adoption of these services have been rapid, with some achieving a million users within a few months, consolidation of user profiles and networks is a growing concern. An individual's information is scattered around in siloes, stored in locked profiles in various social networks, while others are recorded in blogs. Attempts to unify these siloed information have brought about the birth of standards such as FOAF, but the adoption of such standards by the major services have been slow.

The intention to create a central database of personal data has led to the creation of Biojack (www.biojack.com), a Wiki for biographical information. Built on top of MediaWiki, the same engine that runs Wikipedia, the largest encyclopedia on the Net, Biojack allows any Netizen to add or edit biographical entries of themselves or other individuals, such as history figures, contemporary newsmakers or celebrities.

Biojack's founder, Jason Banico, believes that wiki is the best model for indexing the social web. No standard profile format can capture the richness of an individual. The flexibility of a wiki can allow one to write biographical articles in prose, a list of profile entries, a collection of links to blogs, social network profiles, FOAF files, genealogy site entries, photo albums and many others. Its flexibility will also allow it to be equally useful to a researcher in need of biographical information or to a blogger who would like to have a personal repository of profile links.

Biojack is currently inviting the public to post biographical entries to the service. The invitation is posted in its main page, which includes instructions on how to create a Biojack entry for newbies.

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