Two of the people behind Bizwiki will be at the Hyperlocal (Local 2.0) mashup Workshop in London tomorrow (3rd October).

This Workshop aims to provide a forum for the people, organisations and companies working in the ‘local’ sector affected by and developing solutions, to collaborate around a number of key issues.

Keith Hinde, Bizwiki’s Chief Technical Architect, and Jurga Galvan, Bizwiki’s Social Marketer will be in attendance, so if you have any questions or would like a chat about what we’re doing in the local space please feel free to come along.

Mashup Hyperlocal

We are pleased to announce that Casey Lee has joined Bizwiki as an on-staff editor and is already doing a sterling job.

As Bizwiki has become more popular the amount of new submissions from the public has continued to increase. With a background in customer support and assistance for companies such as BP, Casey joins the other members of the Admin and Editing team to help get through your submissions as quickly as possible. Her responsibilities include verifying and approving (or rejecting) new submissions and revision requests.

We are certain that with the addition of Casey to the team and the soon to be released improvements Bizwiki will be an even better, faster source of quality business information for the UK.

So “Welcome Casey“!

Yesterday’s post on the Kelsy Group blog highlights the fact that people no longer want to search through categories to find businesses, they want to search by service or product or other “keywords”. They want to use “natural search”.

This is where Bizwiki is leading the way in local search. Bizwiki provides the standard categorisation for anyone wishing to search that way, however the majority of our users use the free form search box. By building a unique synonym set and merging it with our own proprietary algorithm Bizwiki is able to provide relevant local results in seconds.

Here are just a few examples of the relevant results Bizwiki’s NaturalSearch functionality provides:

Looking for a curry house in Birmingham?

Has your Selby office run out of printer ink?

Do you need help selling your Essex based business?

Want to know where the all night petrol stations in Warwick are?

Going on holiday from Swansea and need travel money?

NaturalSearch is the way forward. Why limit users to selecting a category? Why confine them to some archaic taxonomy?

Bizwiki’s NaturalSearch technology is still in the beginning stages. If you think it’s good now just wait til you see what we have in store!

This will be old news to some of our most frequent users, but with the final elements integrated we are very happy to announce that Bizwiki is now the power behind the extremely popular Accessplace Business Directory.

Anyone following the Bizwiki Blog will have read our announcement on July 25th that we now power the TownPages.com local information website.

‘One more reason to add your business to Bizwiki – TownPages’

This has now been heavily underlined by the powering of Accessplace, which Hitwise list alongside such respected sites as Google Maps, Yell.com, BT and Local.co.uk in the top 10 of the UK’s Local Search sites.

See the top 10 table here:

What this means to our users is that by adding your business or increasing the amount of information available about it on Bizwiki, you will get exposure not only to our users but to the very many people who use Townpages for local search and the vast audience of Accessplace Business Directory.

Additional information including photographs is provided to all three sites by Local Data Company, but the only way to get a new company listed is to add it right here.

The good news is its completely free to do so. That’s the wiki difference.

An article for the British newspaper the Telegraph highlights the importance of Internet Directory sites like Bizwiki for businesses forced to save marketing budgets in adverse economic conditions.

‘Blog on and use web pages to drive up sales opportunities

By Richard Tyler, Enterprise Editor

Given the current economic slowdown and that marketing is often the first expense to be cut when firms face a financial pinch, here is a snapshot of some free services being used by firms on the internet.

Internet directories

Traditional directories have moved online, like Yell.com. New free sites feature highly on natural searches: www.Brownbook.net and www.Bizwiki.co.uk are fast-growing business directories with self-edited listings and customer reviews.’

At Bizwiki, we whole-heartedly agree with his assessment. More and more commerce is moving online, and with all the talk of possible recession and belt-tightening in the wider economy, it makes more sense than ever to take full advantage of resources that are available online for businesses -particularly sites like Bizwiki that list companies for no charge at all.

The first step is to make sure your company is listed -simply use the search form at the top of the page. If it isn’t, you can add it for free in a few simple steps. If it is listed, now would be a good time to add more information and details.

Bizwiki gets a wide variety of users from other businesses owners and managers to researchers to competitors to local councils to suppliers – and perhaps even your next customer.

Full article: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml?xml=/money/2008/08/12/ybmedia112.xml

In case you needed another great reason to add your business to Bizwiki -or to add more information and details if you’re already listed- Bizwiki has just joined in powering the TownPages.com local information website.

TownPages is a popular destination website that has hundreds of thousands of unique users every month. Their goal is to provide information about all the towns and communities outside the main centres, the places that are often over-looked online. Bizwiki information is being added alongside The Local Data Company’s, helping build this useful site into an even more comprehensive resource.

Adding a company to Bizwiki is quite simple and completely free of charge, and any company listed here will also appear on TownPages.com free of charge. You can manage your company’s internet listings from a central location on Bizwiki, add much more detailed information than was previously possible, and best of all benefit from a larger online audience without any extra effort.

Visit the new TownPages website, http://www.townpages.com

Register on Bizwiki, http://bizwiki.co.uk/user/register

Add a company or business, http://bizwiki.co.uk/addcompany.htm

In a move that we see as another validation the user-submitted and collaborative approach that Bizwiki is founded on, The Encyclopaedia Britannica has announced that it is opening up to allow user submissions to its 240-year-old publication.

This is a major move for Britannica, which has not just resisted the concepts of peer-production but been famously critical of the wiki model of gathering information until now.

In another parallel with what we’ve been doing on Bizwiki, Britannica intends to edit and moderate changes to their core information, attempting to merge the best effects of the grassroot compilation and editing of information that has made Wikipedia great with the authority of the traditional encyclopedia.

In their announcement Britannica have said that it is their intention to create “a welcoming community for scholars, experts, and lay contributors”.

Britannica hopes that by editing all changes to its core base of information before they are posted online they will be able to receive input from their users while remaining a trusted source. Their registered users and scholars will be able to post about new topics without intervention, but Britannica says all articles on new topics will be fact-checked and vetted before appearing in their main edition.

In similar way, while open to entries from all our users, Bizwiki requires users to register before making changes, and certain key parts of business records require approval by trusted editors.

Whether it will be possible for Britannica to compete with the entirely open model that Wikipedia has entrenched remains to be seen, but we wish them well. As a business site, we believe that it’s vitally important that users can trust and rely on information, and that registered users are much less likely to make careless or malicious edits of competitor’s information.

It may be the case that there is still room for a similar approach in the realm of online-Encycopedias.

Bizwiki, the UK Business Wiki site founded on the principle of allowing users free access to edit, update and add data to business records, has joined the call to free access to parts of the data held by government departments.“We’ve seen just how much demand there is for relevant information online, to the degree that thousands of people have signed up over the last 12 months to help Bizwiki compile and improve records about local businesses across the country,’ said Matt Aird, co-founder of Bizwiki.co.uk.

‘What we are now asking is that the government move to make more taxpayer’s data available to them. In short, we believe that access to publicly acquired data should be free.’

‘Free access to public datasets would have a huge impact on usability and accuracy,’ added Keith Hinde, Chief Technical Architect for Bizwiki. ‘By cross referencing businesses people list on Bizwiki with Companies House data, we could provide a cleaner, deeper and more reliable dataset to end users, reducing the need for manual moderation or checking.’

‘Using PAF data, we could enhance usability and consistency with guided address editing or detailed validation’, he continued. ‘With access to the Ordnance Survey’s AddressPoint data, we could provide much more accurate plotting of businesses on maps, making it easier for customers to locate businesses and hopefully reducing the time spent driving around trying to locate a particular business.’

Agencies ranging from the Ordnance Survey to the Highways Agency are either government-owned or receive large portions of their income from the public sector or taxpayer, but charge for data with exacting copyright restrictions that prevent or hamper re-use of the data.

Following in the footsteps of the Guardian Technology’s drive for free public access to data about the UK and its citizens and organisations such as INSPIRE’s campaign ‘State-collected Geographic Data is public property’, Bizwiki is joining the argument in favour of liberating public access to non-confidential company and mapping data.

‘If there is one thing that the growth of the business on the internet has shown us, it’s that there are tremendous benefits to making more data available to people for free,’ concluded Matt Aird.

For more information about Bizwiki, the free business wiki that anyone can edit, see http://www.bizwiki.co.ukFor more information about INSPIRE, see http://publicgeodata.org/For more information about The Guardian’s Free our Data Campaign http://www.freeourdata.org.uk/

Although anyone can write on Bizwiki, all entries are held for approval by editors and many have to be edited by the editorial team before being published. Submissions are usually reviewed on a “first come, first served” basis but that doesn’t mean they are published that way.

If you want to ensure your Bizwiki submission, be it a new listing or a revision to an existing listing, is approved quickly it helps to present the editor with little or nothing to correct.

Read more »

You have added your company to Bizwiki (or someone else has) and people using the site can find your address, telephone number and read a little bit about your company.

Does it end there?

Absolutely not!

Read more »