New French news and blog search engine.

By Pandia Guest Writer Lars VÃ¥ge

“Le média c’est vous”. It sounds like Dan Gillmor speaking French, but it isn’t.

Back in 1999 the Internet entrepreneur Pierre Chapaz started the comparison shopping site Kelkoo which was subsequently bought by Yahoo! a couple of years ago for nearly 500 million Euro.

After having worked both for IBM and Yahoo! Chapaz has now started a new interesting project. Wikio was launched last week and has received a lot of coverage in French media and blogs.

We are talking about a new French news search service clearly influenced by the Web 2.0 concepts.

So what makes Wikio special?

• Wikio is indexing not only professional news media, but also blogs
• Users may influence search engine ratings by voting on search listings
• You can add comments to listings
• You may even write your own news articles and Wikio will index them
• Articles and blog posts are automatically given category tags
• RSS-feeds are available for both tags and search expressions.

In a podcast interview Pierre Chapaz describes Wikio as “Google News meeting Technorati meeting Digg”.

With Wikio you should be able to search for news, make comments, vote for posts and write your own articles Chapaz says.

For the time being there is only a French version, but other European languages will be covered later this year, including English, German, Spanish and Italian.

Wikio is definitely a child of its time. It is easy to use even for those with a limited knowledge of French. I am looking forward to the English and German Wikios!

See also Wikio.com looking for beta testers.

This article was originally published in Internetbrus, a Swedish blog on search engines and Internet searching that has been online since early 2001. It is written for both searchers and educators.

Internetbrus is owned and edited by Lars Våge and Lars Iselid. Lars Våge works as a librarian at Mitthögskolan and a programmer for JL Informationsteknik. Lars Iselid is a librarian at the Umeå University Library, freelance journalist for the computer magazine
Datormagazin. He can be found blogging under the pseudonym Cyrille at Iaslash.org.

Lars and Lars are co-authors of a book on Internet research: Informationssökning på Internet.