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• It’s editable – The ‘anyone-can-edit’ approach is a challenge to the frequently out-of-date records of traditional printed Business Directories.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.