OpenServing the Community

It's all over the web right now - 'Wikipedia founder remakes Web publishing economics' seems to be the root of it:

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Free software is about to get freer.

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said on Monday his for-profit company, Wikia Inc., is ready to give away -- for free -- all the software, computing, storage and network access that Web site builders need to create community collaboration sites.

Wikia, a commercial counterpart to the non-profit Wikipedia, will go even further to provide customers -- bloggers or other operators who meet its criteria for popular Web sites -- 100 percent of any advertising revenue from the sites they build.
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Started two years ago, Wikia (http://www.wikia.com) aims to build on the anyone-can-edit success of the Wikipedia online encyclopedia. Using the same underlying software, called MediaWiki, Wikia hosts group publishing sites, known as wikis, on topics from Star Wars to psychology to travel to iPods...

So I hopped over to OpenServing to check it out - and ended up registering. Why? Personally, this may be part of the solution for what I was trying to do with OpenDepth.com. The business model for myself would be exactly the same, without the cost of hosting. I registered (KnowProSE.OpenServing.com; maybe it will work out and maybe it won't, time will tell.

Will it have an effect on web publishing? Maybe. It really depends on how the community responds. It appears to be a viable solution for people who are trying to create content, and may be an informational clearing house in the future. Librarians might want to look into this too.

Again, time will tell.