Centiare

Centiare is powered by the same collaboration and editing software used by Wikipedia, but taken to the next level. With the addition of custom extensions that enhance its core functionality, you can do things on Centiare that just aren't possible (or welcome) on Wikipedia or other wiki sites. Things like:

* Monetize your Directory listing and/or Main page article
* Plug in YouTube videos within a page (example)
* Promote your resume, an auction, your products, whatever!
* List your "friends" within Centiare (example)
* Upload not only pictures, but also MP3 files, PDF or Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations, and more
* Perform multi-level searches for specific things, like:

-- White male, over 6 feet, with a Masters degree, in Pennsylvania
-- Home heating oil company, at least 50 years in business, in New Jersey
-- Entities between the 39th and 40th parallels (example)

Those amazing searches are all possible because the best Centiare users will employ semantic tagging capabilities to organize, search, and report on information.

Meanwhile, for topics that would not have any legal standing in a courtroom (i.e., things like rainfall, fiber optic cable, the Rocky Mountains, glue, surfing), Centiare has the familiar Main page article space. Articles in Main space should be written with a neutral point-of-view (NPOV), and they may be edited by any user (nobody has "ownership" of Main space articles).

Centiare is getting a good amount of traffic for a site that's been open to the public for only four months. We're especially proud of the fact that we average 7.0 page views per visitor. That means our look, feel, and content is engaging! It's not YouTube traffic. It's not MySpace traffic. But, we're already consistently beating other media sites that have been around for years and years.

This Alexa Daily Pageviews graph for the better part of the First Quarter 2007 suggests that Centiare captures far more page viewings than any of these respectable media properties:

* Gazette.com - the primary newspaper of Colorado Springs, CO (a metro area with population of 587,500).
* WBTV.com - the CBS television affiliate of Charlotte, NC (the 18th largest city in the United States)
* ArtsJournal.com - founded in 1999, the site is a digest of some of the best arts and cultural journalism culled from over 200 sources
* FMQB.com - the famous radio trade journal, Friday Morning Quarterback, was launched in 1968 and maintains 10,000 paid subscribers to its venerable monthly print magazine, as well as daily visitors to its website

While Centiare may trail them in raw visitors, we dominate each of them in total page views.

For the first quarter of 2007, Centiare recorded nearly 14,000 visits and over 96,000 page views, according to Google Analytics. Returning visitors make up 25% of the traffic. The top inbound sources of traffic are Google search results, followed by message boards and blogs where we're mentioned. We serve about 60 to 80 megabytes of data per day.

Semantic tagging that's taking place in Centiare will fall into two types of scenarios -- Relations and Attributes.

Suppose you were writing an article about the city of Berlin, Germany. You could easily type out in the article that "Berlin is the capital of the unified country of Germany, and there are nearly 3.4 million people living in its metropolitan area." That's really good encyclopedia information.

However, if someone searches for the exact phrase "capital of Germany" or "population of Berlin", your sentence that happens to answer both of those questions would not be returned by either of those particular text searches. What we hope to see in Centiare is active use of the semantic tagging process, so that such information is more likely to be found -- by either humans typing in commands, or machines programmed to find information.

So, the essence of semantic tagging is, somewhere in the Berlin article text, or in an infobox, or even in an addendum at the bottom of the article, if you want to create a semantic link that describes a "capital-relationship", this is done by writing:

[[capital of::Germany]]

Note the use of two (2) colons in succession. You've just created a semantic tag Relation.

Furthermore, if you want to create a semantic link that describes a "population-attribute", this is done by writing:

[[population:=3396990]]

Note the use of the colon and equal sign in succession. You've just created a semantic tag Attribute. (By the way, don't add commas to population; this attribute has a Type:Integer, which means it will be displayed as 3,396,990.)