Zimbio allows users to make their own open topic portals and private extranets.

If there was any doubt: the world has definitely discovered the power of online social networking as a tool for generate content and guidance.

Take Zimbio, for instance, a site that in many respects are similar to the old About site.

Like About it presents topic sub-sites with articles, links to relevant sites and discussion forums. Hence these sub sites are more than plain web directories, but less than complete web sites. Their main function is to guide people to relevant information on the Net.

User driven search portal

However, while the About topic sites are edited by appointed editors, anyone can contribute to the Zimbio sub sites. In this respect Zimbio is more like wikis like the Wikipedia, sites where users write the content.

Each sub site or portal on Zimbio includes photo albums, headline feeds, links to articles and news, and a group blog and forum. (See for instance the Pandora guide to Internet Radio.)

Editorial control

This means that Zimbio can harvest a vast amount of free information from enthusiastic users. The downside is, of course, that the lack of strict editorial control may lead to sub quality sub sites, and a lot of spam.

Zimbio is trying to solve this with the use of “gurus”. All members have access to basic editing and deleting. But only gurus can edit or delete all types of content, including blog entries and submitted photos. Gurus are asked to review their sites on a frequent basis.

Search engine marketing people should not that there is not much to get from links at Zimbio PageRank-wise. It seems Zimbio is adding ref=”nofollow” tags to all links. If the search engines later on decide that the Zimbio sub sites should be considered trustworthy and authoritative, they may choose to ignore this tag, but at the moment the main value of a Zimbio link is the traffic that link generates in its own right.

The use of the nofollow tag will probably also help controlling the amount of content spam.

Private portals

This week Zimbio added a new feature: “Private portals”. In essence this service enables you to establish your own closed “extranet” for people you invite. In a mail to Pandia Zimbio says that private portals are built on the same collaborative media and allow people to save, organize, and share their favorite content about any topic.

We will come back with a review of Zimbio later on, in which we also compare Zimbio with alternative sites like Fanpop, Squidoo, and Jeteye.

See also: Behind the scenes at Fanpop, where Pandia interviews Dave Lu of the new folksonomy site Fanpop.