Wikio

Wikio News is a European online portal for news and blogs. It was launched on June 19, 2006 in France and is also available in other countries since 2007.
Unlike other search engines for news, such as Google News, Wikio receives its information from different media. It references news pages as well as blogs, consumer’s subjective websites and merchants’ pages in five languages: English, French, German, Italian and Spanish.
History
Wikio was founded by Pierre Chappaz, who had previously developed the price comparison service Kelkoo which was sold to Yahoo in 2004. Wikio News and the firms Ebuzzing, Nomao, OverBlog, Wikio Buzz and Wikio Experts form the Wikio Group.
Operating Mode
Through Wikio, users can create their own personalised news pages in order to follow news or topics. They can subscribe to selected media and blogs as well as receive all news for a certain keyword. Wikio offers an RSS feed for each page and each category that can be added to any RSS reader.
The English version of Wikio contains information of over 200 000 media and blogs. Worldwide, Wikio references over two million sources in five languages.
By voting for an article, the users can influence the news ranking directly. The most popular entries with the most votes are classified as the best and are the first to be seen on Wikio. Furthermore, the users can comment on articles and create some themselves.
Blog ranking
On every 5th of the month, Wikio publishes its ranking of blogs in different categories. To ensure a certain quality of the blogs’ content, the ranking is created depending upon the number of tweets and the weight and number of backlinks on a blog, which means the links that lead to that specific blog from different websites. Thus, Wikio is generating a ranking which is as up to date and representative as possible. The bloggers can show their position in Wikio’s ranking with a badge on their blog.
Tools and Widgets
Wikio offers different tools for bloggers and webmasters. By merging several existing buttons, the Wikio tools aid at facilitating the online communication. Furthermore, by referencing websites and blogs on Wikio, the online visibility for more readers will be improved.
Technical aspects
Wikio is using a semantic search engine developed by the French software company Sinequa.
In September 2008, Wikio launched Wikio Labs, an online research lab. There, new projects, which are still in their beta format, are shared with users to obtain their feedback. Wikio Labs is supervised by Jean Véronis, a French university professor in the field of informatics who is specialised in Natural Language Processing.
International development
Wikio is available in five European countries (France, United Kingdom, Germany, Italy and Spain) and in the U.S..

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