Name of your website?My Wiki City
Your name?
Rick
Your Location (city, etc)
Anchorage
Please give us a short summary of your website?
Community developed website with a simple mission statement: to catalog every city, town and village on Earth
What inspired you to launch your own website?
Lack of information on smaller towns on the internet, and lack of a single website that contains all the key information I would want to know about a town like Healy, Alaska (population 860).
When did you launch your first website, and what was it?
Feb 2008, it has just been launched!
How did you decide on a name for your website?
I asked friends, family, colleagues -- basically anyone who would listen. Utlimately I embraced the Wiki concept and wanted the viewers to feel they own the site, and feel that they can make it better. Hence "My" Wiki City.
What makes it different from other, similar offerings?
No other site contains information on such a broad set of cities in a single place.
What is your eventual goal? (To sell it, keep it for income, secure a book or other mainstream media deal?)
No financial motives. My goals is simply to build a site that brings people together and gathers information that people find useful. If someone references my site in a paper, a book, or a their blog -- then we have achieved our goal.
How does your investment of time and money balance against your success?
I have little money to invest, I rely on folks like you at the World Website Directory to help get the word out! Time is also limited, but I find myself spending nights trying to update the site, adding towns, and trying to get the word out.
If you had an unlimited development budget for development, how would you change your site?
I would spend more time in adding cities to the site. Right now we only have 8400 cities in there.
If your site got really big, really quickly, would you be able to keep up with the demand?
Yes, although I may request user donations to help contain the cost. I think the Wikipedia concept works really well, and that is what my site is modeled on.
What unexpected costs and headaches have you had to deal with?
I didn't realize how many cities there are in just the US, let alone the whole world... We are just getting started. Most cities in the US are in, and we're getting rolling on Australia now.
What has been your biggest challenge?
Balancing the quality of each article with the number of articles I want to complete. (In this case, an "article" maps to a city or town.
What method has been most successful for promoting your website?
Search engine submission -- I have heard that DMOZ, Google, and Yahoo will bring you 99.9% of the traffic you'll eventually get, and that appears to be holding true so far.
How has running your website differed from your expectations?
It has been so much more fun and rewarding than I could ever imagine.
How long have you run the site already, and how long will you continue to keep it up if you don't enjoy big gains in traffic, income or popularity?
It has just been a month, I hope this is just the beginning of a LONG and fun ride! If I'm still doing this three years from now, I can't even imagine what the site will look like then.
Why do you think no one built this kind of a site before?
I think that people tend to browse the web in a very "task-oriented" way. e.g. If I'm looking for real estate in my area, I will go to realtor.com and browse surrounding towns. If I'm looking for school district information in my area, I may go to the US Dept of Education website. But what if I could go to one place and get all the data on my town and the towns around it? Better yet, what if I could contribute to that information based on my own experiences? That's the whole concept behind My Wiki City.
What is your website address?
My Wiki City
