Work is underway on a huge update of business records across the site.

This is a giant project involving changes and additions across hundreds of categories of business and hundreds of thousands of companies, and involves manually submitted entries added by our users and editors, updates from databases and detailed information gathered by our BizwikiBot spider.

We expect to have the new version rolled out across the site soon, and hope that it will help Bizwiki be an ever more useful resource for our many visitors and users.

Watch this space for more information!

We are pleased to announce a huge update of Bizwiki UK’s index of companies and information has been completed. Consisting of tens of thousands of user-edited records and new additions that have been hand-processed by our editorial team and more than quarter of a million records being updated or having additional information added to them by our BizwikBot spider, this is a major update and should result in even better depth of information across the site.

There is now the grand total of 1,412,330 businesses in the Bizwiki UK database, and thanks to the submissions our registered users and visitors are making this is a number that continues to grow.

A large part of the credit for the quality and depth of information in this update goes to Bizwiki’s Chief Technical Architect, Keith Hinde, who has been slaving away on this piece of work for more than half a year. On behalf of the site’s editors and users, thanks for your tireless efforts!

Thanks also to the  many users and editors who have continued to add high-quality and detailed information about the companies they know, helping make Bizwiki a useful and popular business resource for all our visitors.

We wish all our users a happy and prosperous year in 2012.

It seems that 2011 was a tough year for many businesses due to the state of the economy and turmoil in the markets, but we’re now entering a new one and hope that it will be brighter.

We would also like to take this opportunity to thank all the writers and editors who contributed their diligence, knowledge, time and information to the Bizwiki project during the last year. It has been appreciated, and all our users have benefited from your efforts.

Here’s to the New Year!

Ever seen an old, outdated book? The pages are yellow, crackling, and faded. They’re sometimes cherished, perhaps even immortalised in some library where people can gasp in wonder at all that it represents. But no-one turns its pages, except perhaps some specialist bibliophile. And those are the lucky books; the rest become landfill, or unvisited - even embarrassing - monuments to dead trees.

Such is the fate of the traditional yellow page directory. Why? In an age of online directories, print directories are like clay tablets: large, cumbersome, limited, and unwieldy.

Even then, the comparison can’t emphasise just how obsolete they’ve become, all over the world. If you’re a business owner, you normally can’t get your details printed in them without paying a regular fee. You can’t easily edit the information without calling up the publisher. And even if you get your details in there, that’s it: you’re in a single publisher’s directory, viewable only to people who get the printed brick dropped outside their door. And what if there’s a mistake in the book, or your details change? No fixes will be forthcoming until the next print run.

Compare that with something like Bizwiki, for example: anyone can submit their business details to it, covering a wide range of information - information about your company, your email addresses, website addresses, and phone numbers - far beyond the traditional few words you’re limited to in print. Anyone can edit the business information as well, which makes it exceptionally easy to keep the information up-to-date and current. Best of all, it’s completely free. There’s no pushy sales people to deal with trying to sell you extras; it’s completely in your control, and that’s the way it should be.

On top of that, anyone using a search engine like Google looking for “Plumbers in Aldershot” or “Attorneys in Austin, Texas” is a potential customer. (Not to mention that, depending on your business, your potential customers could now be located anywhere in the UK, US or even the whole world, instead of being limited to a particular geographic location). Plus, if you add your details to Bizwiki UK, for example, you’ll appear in other directories on-line, like AccessPlace.com, increasing your exposure.

Then, consider the user, or customer, who wants to find a business. Printed directories have one method of organisation: dumping everything into categories, and organising them alphabetically. You can’t search by postcode, zip code, state, town or city. You can’t search for a particular business name. In short, with on-line directories, the customer is not limited to one particular method of finding business information.

Then, there’s the issue of portability. Mobile phone usage across the world has sky-rocketed. If you’re on the train, and want to find a nearby restaurant, tome-like yellow page monstrosities can’t sit there conveniently in your back-pocket.

Realistically, the only thing yellow-page style printed directories are destined for is the recycling bin. Alternatively, you could have a bit of fun and collect them from your neighbours, dump them on the doorstep of the publisher, and get scolded for creating a fire hazard. But, the point is, we simply don’t use them anymore, because they’ve been superseded by a new medium that is more current, accurate, and easy to use, for both business owners and customers. Plus, digital content isn’t made of dead trees, and that can only be a good thing.

If you are a business owner, and have a website as part of your on-line marketing strategy, this bit of news may be of interest to you. Recently, Google announced that it is now supporting what it calls “rich snippets” for local search.

“Rich snippets” is basically Google’s implementation of various “microformats”. Microformats are pieces of structured HTML code that can describe your website page, which in turn will help Google properly classify your website, make it accessible on their Place pages, and also help them understand the content on the page itself.

While it may sound daunting, rich snippets are very easy to implement, and help Google identify information such as reviews, people profiles, business listings, and events. As a simple example, let’s say you have a webpage where you normally list your contact details using the following HTML code:

<p>

   <h4>Bob’s Building Company</h4>

   Contact me, Andrew Other, on:<br />

   Work: 01252 XXXX<br />

   Cell: 0795 XXXXXXX<br /><br />

   Our work address is:<br />

   147 Some Street<br />

   Another Town<br />

   GU8 8AA, UK

</p>

With rich snippets, you can now tell Google what each bit of information represents:

<p class=”vcard”>

   <h4 class=”org”>Bob’s Building Company</h4>

   Contact me, <span class=”fn”>Andrew Other</span>, on:<br />

   <span class="tel">

      <span class="type">Work</span>:

      <span class="value">01252 XXXX</span><br />

   </span>   

   <span class="tel">

      <span class="type">Cell</span>:

      <span class="value">0795 XXXXXXX</span><br /><br />

   </span>

   <div class="adr">

      Our <span class="type">work</span> address is:<br />

      <span class="street-address">147 Some Street</span><br />

      <span class=”locality”>Another Town</span><br />

      <span class=”region”>Hampshire</span><br />

      <span class=”postal-code”>GU8 8AA</span>, <span class=”country-name”>UK</span>

   </div>

</p>

While this may at first glance look strange, close inspection shows there is method to the madness. Let’s break it down:

<p class=”vcard”>: This tells Google that all information between the opening and closing <p></p> tags is part of a vCard. A vCard is a microformat standard that helps describe information about a person or business.

<h4 class=”org”>Bob’s Building Company</h4>: org tells Google that “Bob’s Building Company” is the name of the organisation that this vCard is associated with.

<span class=”fn”>Andrew Other</span>: fn tells Google that “Andrew Other” is the name of the person this vCard is associated with. (if fn and org both have the same value, Google will treat the vCard as being details for a place of business). This next one is a bit more tricky:

<span class=”tel”>
   <span class=”type”>Work</span>:
   <span class=”value”>01252 XXXX</span><br />
</span>

The first portion, <span class=”tel”> … </span> tells Google that everything between the <span></span> tags  is a telephone number. <span class=”type”>Work</span> then tells Google the the telephone number is a Work number, and then <span class=”value”>01252 XXXX</span>instructs Google as to what the telephone number actually is.

The next telephone number deals with a cellphone number, so you’ll see that we used the same format as the work number, but we told Google that the type is different:  <span class=”type”>Cell</span>

The last portion of our example details the work address for Andrew Other:

<div class=”adr”>
   Our <span class=”type”>work</span> address is:<br  />
   <span class=”street-address”>147 Some  Street</span><br />
   <span class=”locality”>Another Town</span><br  />
   <span class=”region”>Hampshire</span><br />
   <span class=”postal-code”>GU8 8AA</span>, <span  class=”country-name”>UK</span>
</div>

As you can see, the format is quite similar yet again.  <div class=”adr”> is telling Google that the information that follows details an address, <span class=”type”>work</span> says it is a work address, and then each element of the address is broken down according to “street-address”, “locality”, “region”, “postal-code” and “country-name”.

There are many different codes for the hCard format, which can be viewed on the Microformat website, along with more in-depth explanations, and examples.

Also, as mentioned earlier, Google also supports formats for reviews, events, businesses and organisations, and even recipes.

For more information on Google’s Rich Snippets, the following links should help:

Rich Snippets for Local Search
Rich Snippets Help Documentation

The brand new version of Bizwiki.co.uk went live yesterday at lunchtime. Apart from being shinier, faster and easier to use than ever before, there is one change that will be instantly noticeable and that brings it in line with the US Bizwiki.com:

Bizwiki.co.uk is now review-free

This may seem to be bucking the trend for websites, with every second site on the web now offering review functionality, but we took the view that we would rather focus our efforts on what Bizwiki does best: building up a unique directory of detailed information about companies and businesses that any user can help improve and enlarge.

Bizwiki has always been dedicated to information over opinion, so it was on request from users that we rolled out a review feature for our UK site at a time where there were less alternatives. Apart from the useful information reviews provide, our goal was to ensure that opinions had their own space on the site and were less likely to be added to information sections.

Over the last few years we have seen the site and its users develop and change, and now an increasing proportion of registered Editors are representatives, owners or managers of businesses and companies. The quality of information has been consistently improving and we’ve been very happy to see the user base grow along with it.

We launched the US version of Bizwiki.com without reviews, and found that this has been nothing but beneficial in clarifying the purpose of this as the wiki for business, and distinguishing Bizwiki from sentiment-orientated sites like Yelp and Angieslist.

We are confident that this improved focus will give our users more of what they want, and enable our editors and staff to concentrate on increasing both the breadth of the site and the depth of information available about each record.

Finally I’d like to thank our Lead Developer Craig Sefton and Chief Technical Architect Keith Hinde for their tireless efforts to rebuild the site and get this new and highly improved version live.

Enjoy the new Bizwiki!

A note to businesses:

During the time that reviews were featured on Bizwiki.co.uk some companies accumulated a number of reviews from the public that they may want to retain. If so, don’t worry, nothing has been deleted. The reviews are not being displayed on this site, but are still available on request if you would like to get a copy of them for use on your own website or in your advertising material.

Email us at team@bizwiki.co.uk before the end of 2010 with the name of the company and we will send you a text copy of the reviews received free of charge.

Thanks.

The Bizwiki project reached another milestone earlier today, when our 100,000th Editor registered on Bizwiki.co.uk.

We believe the most important thing about this achievement is that it is a good time to say ‘Thank you’ to these people, many of whom are busy company managers and representatives of the businesses they are updating, for their assistance in building up the wiki for business.

Millions of people access and use the information on the sites every month, but it is the people who join the site to edit, add and improve the information on it that make Bizwiki what it is.

The Bizwiki site is built around a self-organised and collaborative community that any of our users are invited to join. Rather than the usual experience of just reading what a website has to say, everyone is invited to actively participate. Users can help produce for themselves the best and most comprehensive index of businesses on the web, or the most detailed index of companies in their town or even street.

If you’d like to join in, add a company or update any of the information on the site, just click the Create Account link to become a Bizwiki Editor.

It’s a fast-growing club you are more than welcome to join!

We are pleased to be able to announce that Bizwiki.com now powers the business listings on the Allonesearch.com local search website.

You can now find information provided directly from Bizwiki powering Allonesearch’s search functionality and appearing on many of the business directory pages.

What this exciting development means to our visitors is that by adding your business or increasing the amount of information available about it on Bizwiki, you will get exposure not only to out community of users on this site but also to people using Allonesearch for local information and yellow page look-ups.

If you would like to get a new company added to both Bizwiki and Allonesearch.com it’s now easier than ever, just click to add it right here.

And the best part is that it’s completely free to do so. That’s the wiki difference.

We are happy to announce that the American version of Bizwiki.com went fully live today. Bizwiki was launched as an Alpha in the USA in December 2008, promising to change the way local search works by enabling its users to build up the most detailed and up-to-date index of business in the United States.

The new fully live version features over 5,000 categories of business, and in contrast to traditional Yellow Pages websites invites business owners and representatives to add and improve their companies’ records with everything from contact details to prices and opening hours, completely free of charge.

“We are also launching new functionality today that allows the site’s users to ‘Watch’ any business, receiving an email notifying them of any additions and edits,” said Bizwiki co-founder Matt Aird. “This is useful for anyone who is interested in following changes, but is primarily designed to empower people to get involved in claiming their own businesses and ensuring the information the public sees stays as accurate and relevant as possible.”

Creating a ‘Watchlist’ of businesses on Bizwiki is free. Representatives are invited to sign up with Bizwiki.com and look up the companies they are interested in, then simply click ‘Watch this business’ to receive notification of any changes to the record. They are also able to add more information and details to records while doing so.

At the moment the Watchlist functionality is only available on Bizwiki.com, but expect to see it duplicated on Bizwiki.co.uk in the coming months.

We are happy to announce that after months of hard work, thousands of hours of dedicated effort by our editors and tens of thousands of contributions of business details from both company owners and the general public, the full set of business categories is now live on Bizwiki.com.

This is a real mile-stone in the progress of this project, meaning that the site has moved out of Beta into its fully live version. There are now over 5,000 categories of business on Bizwiki.com, divided into vertical groups of similar categories to make navigating and searching the site easy.

We expect to make further improvements over the months ahead, particularly as some of these categories are fleshed out with additional companies and details, but in the meantime we’d like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who has added records or edited and improved the information on Bizwiki. It is greatly appreciated.

We hope you have a very Merry Christmas, and a Happy New Year.

Watch this space in 2010!