Kindo with Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia founder) in Istanbul

Last week, we had a famous and interesting visitor in Istanbul. We were invited to a seminar by Jimmy Wales who is the founder of Wikipedia. It’s not so common that this type of guests speak everyday in your country so we went there. It took place in Ortakoy Esma Sultan Yalısı which is one of the best organization centers in Istanbul. The good thing about the seminar was invitees were all from either press or the bloggers. So, we also had a great chance to have some networking opportunities with the people whom we personally do not know but follow their blogs.

For example, Volkan (http://blog.wolkanca.com/) who was so responsive in his Kindo investigations and one of the first to give a link to Kindo website was also there. We also came across Suleyman who is a devoted blog writer with his professional camera while taking pictures for his website www.gunesintamicinde.com and I need to thank to him since he took our pictures when I got angry to myself for forgetting my camera at home. In addition to that, we also had a chance to talk to many other bloggers of which Arda Kutsal was a great supporter of Kindo. Arda is a well known blogger in Turkey with his www.webrazzi.com and www.blograzzi.com websites and his enthusiasm to follow the latest trends in web2.0 world. He said Kindo is a great place for family social networking and informed me about his coming review about Kindo and niche social networking websites in general. I’ll keep you posted about his review as well.

The conference was really perfect in terms of the organization and in terms of the performance of Jimmy in presenting and answering questions. Main topics discussed were about Wikipedia’s future stance and Wikia search. I will not go in detail about this in this blog post which you might elsewhere find about it; however, I can say Jimmy kept insisting on Wikipedia is a non-profit organization and not seeking for easy way of earning money from paid advertising. And, they have now focused on Wikia search engine project. I was also surprised that there are only 12 people working officially for Wikipedia.

We waited the whole conference ended to have a personal contact with him and introduce Kindo. However, we only had the chance to take a picture as a memory from the day. But, then I have sent an email to him and asked for testing Kindo. I’ll tell you in another blog post when he writes to me next time.

Until then, as the fellows here say, get your family and have a great time with them.

Posted by Oguzhan Aygoren in General, Team, Web | Trackback |