Weblog/10-Jan-2008
We're Launching Three New Services!
10 January 2008 We're excited to announce the availability this afternoon of three new services for the AboutUs community. You may have noticed already that there are three new tabs up in the top right corner of each page on the wiki. Some of these services may be more useful for you than others, but we hope that you'll be as excited as we are to see what we've got to offer.
Here's a quick description of the three new services available:
1. Free monitoring. Any article on the AboutUs site can now be watched automatically for changes - no account creation required. Just click the "Get Page Alerts" tab and enter your email.
2. Premium Service Package. Our new "Promote My Company" package includes in-house design of your business' AboutUs page and personalized wiki coaching for a one time fee of $99. Many companies take the time to learn and design sophisticated AboutUs pages on their own, now you can also get professional design and training services to take it to the next level. Here are some examples of steps that we can work with you to improve your page.
3. Portal Sponsorship. Companies can (and are) now sponsoring topical portals that aggregate business listings and functionality like calendaring and maps for cities around the world and industry verticals. Our showcase Portal right now is the PortlandTech Portal - but there are more in the works and we'll soon launch a technology that will make sophisticated Portals easy for any anyone here to create for free. If you'd like to sponsor one of these fabulous Portals, you'll be glad you did.
Here's how we explain the relationship between individual articles and Portals:
In addition to heavy traffic from search, people also navigate through AboutUs by category - to discover and learn about web pages and companies that are related to each other. These categories of pages can be turned into full-featured portals, which can then be built upon further for events, sub-topics or other collections.
See for example the well-developed AboutUs page for Portland attorneys Schwabe, Williamson & Wyatt, which looks great as a part of the PortlandTech Portal - a collection of topical pages that also served as the foundation for the Venture Northwest 2007 event page where all the participants, including Schwabe, Williamson & Wyatt, can be found listed with links back to their detailed AboutUs pages. AboutUs is a great place to compile detailed company profiles around any topic - so it will benefit you to make sure your company profile page is as effective as it can be.
$99 is a great price for a company to put their best foot forward on this platform, both aesthetically and with assistance from AboutUs in relating to the world of wiki users who will be visiting their page. When you're ready to take it to the next level, consider sponsoring your industry or city's portal. It's a great way to add value to your community and win the admiration that comes with such a contribution.
Those are our new offerings! We hope you'll find something there that's useful for you and your organization. As always, please feel free to contact us any time if you've got any questions or feedback.
Sincerely, RayKing and WardCunningham
