The concept is simple: You register to write articles on a theme of your choosing. Once you have contributed an article, you get to rate or flag other articles in the same category.

It’s not like Wikipedia, because no one can edit your contributions and your point of view is appreciated. It’s not like Squidoo, because there is no affiliation to Amazon or other shopping sites. In fact, there is no way to add links, even.

The rating and flagging process guarantees that good articles rise to the top of the list, bad articles are buried and off-topic or inappropriate articles are removed.

At Search Engine Strategies in New York April 10-13 2007 Pandia had a conversation with Mark Ranally, president and CEO of Helium. This provided a great opportunity to have a look behind the scenes of a new and booming service for user generated content.

What is Helium?

Helium was launched in October. It is a directory of real-world knowledge, powered by regular people with a penchant for writing.

Writing for Helium is popular: Some 250 000 articles have been written since October; between 2000 and 2500 a day during March.

The subject of the article is up to the writer, but to have an editorial feel, the people at Helium headquarters ‘seed’ about 300 titles a week. This means that they suggest titles for new articles, e.g. book reviews, seasonal themes etc.

Why do people contribute to Helium?

Why do thousands of people spend hours and hours writing and posting articles for Helium?

Ranalli attributes this to what he calls Helium’s “platform of recognition”. First of all, it is addictive to see your successful articles receive a good ranking.

“A lot of Helium’s contributors are writers or wannabe writers. They want feedback,” says Ranalli. “But they want safe feedback. Comments in a blog can be harsh, or even offensive. Digg is not fair; it’s more like a cartel. Helium ranking is fair, safe feedback; a kind of peer review.”

Community forums are another motivating factor. They had 680 000 page views last month and Writer’s Workshop is among the most popular forums.

“Successful writers can also earn some money writing for Helium,” says Ranalli. “A portion of the revenue is shared. Top ranking articles, most visited articles and the articles with most advertising value receive a payout,” he explains. Hundreds of people will be making thousands of dollars this year.

Who reads the articles?

Most of Helium’s visitors come from Google. They do a search for a topic that is covered by a Helium article.

Once they are there, it is easy to find what they are looking for: Even if the article that showed up in the Google results turns out to be ranked poorly in Helium, the top ranked articles on the same subject are just one click away.

“We are hoping that once people discover that they find relevant and interesting answers to their questions on Helium, they will go directly to us for answers in stead of search engines,” says Ranalli.

“As opposed to most of the top hits in Google for almost any query, we are not trying to sell anything,” he continues. This should be a boon for all those web searchers out there that are looking for information, not products.

Debating, not just writing

Helium members are encouraged to rate articles, and they do: At present 20 000 peer ratings are done per day.

“Members have a great sense of community and a sense of ownership, not just of their articles, but of Helium,” says Ranalli. “Because of this, the atmosphere is conducive to open and fair debate.”

In fact, many touchy subjects are debated on Helium today. Under the heading Is the Bible trustworthy, you can choose from 120 articles advocating different points of view.

After seeing that the self-policing works and the exchange of opinion is done amicably, the Helium crew has decided to add a debate feature.

They have recruited the help of the Institute for Politics, Democracy & the Internet (IPDI), which is part of the Graduate School of Political Management of The George Washington University. Its mission is to promote the use of the Internet and new communication technologies in politics to enhance democratic values, encourage citizen participation and improve governance.

IPDI will help select 100 topics, which will be shaped into debates. These articles will be structured differently than regular Helium titles. When you write an article, you choose sides: Pro or con.

Other upcoming features

Helium is evolving, adding new features as the community takes shape and the site is filling up with quality content.

Upcoming features are of the Web 2.0 kind: RSS feeds from categories and titles, tagging and ‘Bookmark this article’ buttons.

More of Pandia’s Search Engine Strategies coverage.