Bomis

Bomis is a dot-com company founded in 1996. Its primary businesses are the sale of advertising on the Bomis.com search portal, and the sale of erotic images over the Internet (see also Internet pornography). It was created by Jimmy Wales, most notable as the founder of Wikipedia.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Bomis is most notable for creating the online encyclopedia project Nupedia, and hiring Larry Sanger to manage it. During the early stages of this project, Sanger began the development of Wikipedia, which was originally intended as a sub-project and drafting platform for the more formally organized Nupedia. However, Wikipedia, with its much lower barrier to entry, rapidly outgrew its "parent", and soon became far larger than the main business of Bomis itself.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

For a while, Bomis not only provided web servers and bandwidth for these projects, but owned some key items such as the associated domain names. However, with ever-rising costs, and a general reluctance to display advertising on the site - together with a desire to reflect the spirit of openness and neutrality central to Wikipedia - an alternative ownership model was sought. The Wikimedia Foundation was formally announced on June 20, 2003, and all related assets (both in terms of intellectual property and computer hardware) were transferred or donated to this non-profit organisation. (See: By-laws of the Wikimedia Foundation (PDF file)). Larry Sanger had by this time left the project - since it made no profit with which to pay his wages - but Jimmy Wales retains a key role on the board of the Foundation, along with users elected from the Wikipedia community. The Foundation now funds the operation of Wikipedia (and its sister projects) through donations from various sources.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Jimmy Wales has since started several other wiki-based projects, affiliated to neither Bomis nor Wikimedia.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Dot-com: Dot-com (also dotcom or redundantly dot.com) companies were the collection of start-up companies selling products or services using or somehow related to the Internet. They proliferated in the late 1990s dot-com boom, a speculative frenzy of investment in Internet and Internet-related technical sto...

1996: 1996 is a leap year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar, and was designated the International Year for the Eradication of Poverty....

Advertising: Generally speaking, advertising is the paid promotion of goods, services, companies and ideas by an identified sponsor. Marketers see advertising as part of an overall promotional strategy. Other components of the promotional mix include publicity, public relations, personal selling and sales promot...