I was watching the interview with Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales on Om Malik’s show on Revision3, because I’m always interested in what Jimmy is up to, and he mentioned a site called ArmchairGM, which I don’t recall hearing about before — or at least paying much attention to. Om was talking about how he wanted a combination of his blog and a wiki, so that his community could contribute and get involved more, and Jimmy said he saw ArmchairGM as being close to that kind of thing.
ArmchairGM.com is a sports site that Wikia (the for-profit company that Wales runs) bought earlier this year for $2-million. It’s designed as a kind of combination blog and community site for sports fans, and so it has a bunch of the same features as a blog — posts, comments, etc. — but also many features of a wiki, in that anything can be edited (apart from user profiles), as well as some features of a Facebook-style social network.
For example, the site allows members to give each other gifts (which have a twist, in that they can be created by members), and to vote on or rate each other’s posts and comments — and it also has an interesting level system that allows members to work their way up based on the amount of activity they put into the site. Registering gets you 1,000 points and recruiting a new member gets you 5,000, and you get points for writing a new post, editing a post, and whether your comments get votes or not.
It’s an interesting idea, and the site appears to have gained a substantial amount of traction and developed a strong community. I don’t know how long a period the numbers relate to, but the site says it has more than 73,000 pages and there have been 441,000 edits, 660,000 votes and 173,000 comments. As of September it had about a million page views a month, according to TechCrunch.