Bomis ( to rhyme with "promise") is a
dot-com companyA dot-com company, or simply a dot-com , is a company that does most of its business on the Internet, usually through a website that uses the popular top-level domain, ".com" .While the term can refer to present-day companies, it is also used specifically to refer to companies with...
founded in 1996. Its primary business is the sale of
advertisingAdvertising is a form of communication used to influence individuals to purchase products or services or support political candidates or ideas. Frequently it communicates a message that includes the name of the product or service and how that product or service could potentially benefit the consumer...
on the Bomis.com search portal. It was founded by
Jimmy WalesJimmy Donal "Jimbo" Wales is an American Internet entrepreneur and a co-founder and promoter of Wikipedia. •...
and Tim Shell, and provided support for the free encyclopedia projects
NupediaNupedia was an English-language Web-based encyclopedia whose articles were written by experts and licensed as free content. It was founded by Jimmy Wales and underwritten by Bomis, with Larry Sanger as editor-in-chief...
and
WikipediaWikipedia is a free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its name is a portmanteau of the words wiki and encyclopedia...
. As of 2006, Tim Shell is the CEO of Bomis.
On the Bomis.com site, Bomis creates and hosts web rings around search terms popular among male users. The rings are currently categorized broadly as "Babe", "Entertainment", "Sports", "Adult", "Science fiction", and "Other". The "Adult", "Babe", and "Entertainment" categories are the most frequently updated and the most popular. In addition, Bomis hosts a copy of the
Open Directory ProjectThe Open Directory Project , also known as Dmoz , is a multilingual open content directory of World Wide Web links owned by Netscape that is constructed and maintained by a community of volunteer editors.ODP uses a hierarchical ontology scheme for organizing site listings...
search directory. Revenue from search-related pages is generated from advertising and
affiliate marketingAffiliate Marketing is an Internet-based marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate's marketing efforts...
.
Bomis is best known for having supported the creation of the free-content online
encyclopediaAn encyclopedia is a comprehensive written compendium that holds information from either all branches of knowledge or a particular branch of knowledge. Encyclopedias are divided into articles with one article on each subject covered...
project Nupedia (now defunct), and its offshoot Wikipedia during that encyclopedia's early years.
Hosted content
Bomis ran a website called
Bomis Premium at premium.bomis.com until 2005, offering customers access to premium, X-rated pornographic content.
Until mid-2005, Bomis also featured the
Bomis Babe Report, a free
blogA blog is a type of website, usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse-chronological order...
, publishing news and reviews about
celebritiesA celebrity is a person who is famously recognized in a society or culture.Generally speaking, a celebrity is someone who gets media attention and most frequently has an extroverted personality. The desire to be notable is implied by some to be a part of Western culture and more specifically the...
,
modelthumb|200px|Alesya Nazarova modeling a dress by [[bebe stores|bebe]]A model , sometimes called a mannequin, is a person who is employed for the purpose of displaying and promoting fashion clothing or other products and for advertising or promotional purposes or who poses for works of art.Modeling...
s, and the adult entertainment industry. The
Babe Report prominently linked to
Bomis Premium and frequently posted updates about new models joining Bomis. Bomis has also operated nekkid.info, a free repository of selected erotic photographs, and continues to host
The Babe Engine, "a precision babe search engine", which indexes photos ranging from
glamour photographyGlamour photography is a genre of photography whereby people, usually female, are portrayed in such a way as to emphasize attractiveness and charm...
to
pornographyPornography or porn is the depiction of explicit sexual subject matter for the purposes of sexual excitement.Over the past few decades, an immense industry for the production and consumption of pornography has grown, with the increasing use of the VCR, the DVD, and the Internet, as well as the...
.
In addition, Bomis has provided hosting to websites supporting
ObjectivistObjectivism is the philosophy developed by the Russian-American philosopher and novelist, Ayn Rand. Objectivism holds that reality exists independent of consciousness; that individual persons are in direct contact with this reality through sensory perception; that human beings can gain objective...
and other libertarian political views, including the "Freedom's Nest", a database of books and quotes, and "We the Living", a large objectivist community website which is now defunct.
Role in the creation of Nupedia and Wikipedia
Bomis is best known for having supported the creation of the free-content online
encyclopediaAn encyclopedia is a comprehensive written compendium that holds information from either all branches of knowledge or a particular branch of knowledge. Encyclopedias are divided into articles with one article on each subject covered...
projects Nupedia and Wikipedia. Bomis hosted Nupedia in 2000, and
Larry SangerLawrence Mark "Larry" Sanger is an American philosopher, co-founder of Wikipedia, and the creator of the encyclopedia Citizendium....
was hired to manage and edit that project. A year into the development of Nupedia, Bomis decided the project was too expensive, and a so called "
wikiA wiki is a website that uses wiki software, allowing the easy creation and editing of any number of interlinked Web pages, using a simplified markup language or a WYSIWYG text editor, within the browser...
" was set up as a way to solicit low-cost new drafts for Nupedia.
Wiki as a word, as a concept, and as a software technology for websites that allows multiple users to edit and update a text or program quickly and easily, was an invention of and created and developed by
Ward CunninghamHoward G. "Ward" Cunningham is an american computer programmer who developed the first wiki and HyperCard. A pioneer in both design patterns and Extreme Programming, he started programming the software WikiWikiWeb in 1994 and installed it on the website of his software consultancy, Cunningham &...
in 1994. The new online-encyclopedia on base of Ward's wiki-technology, was named Wikipedia and it looked exactly the same as Cunningham's websites. While originally intended as a "feeder" project for Nupedia, Wikipedia—with its much lower barriers to contribution, and its much lower costs for Bomis—rapidly outgrew its parent in size and attention.
For a while, Bomis provided
web serverThe term web server or webserver can mean one of two things:# A computer program that is responsible for accepting HTTP requests from clients , and serving them HTTP responses along with optional data contents, which usually are web pages such as HTML documents and linked objects .# A computer that...
s and
bandwidthIn computer networking and computer science, digital bandwidth, network bandwidth or just bandwidth is a measure of available or consumed data communication resources expressed in bit/s or multiples of it ....
for these projects, paid Sanger in his role as project editor-in-chief (until he left the projects in 2002), and owned key items such as the associated
domain nameA domain name is an identification label that defines a realm of administrative autonomy, authority, or control in the Internet, based on the Domain Name System ....
s. However, as the costs of Wikipedia rose with its popularity, Bomis' revenues declined as result of the dot-com-crash, a general reluctance to display advertising on the site—together with a desire from the Wikipedia community to reflect the spirit of openness and neutrality central to Wikipedia—suggested an alternative ownership model.
The
Wikimedia FoundationThe Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. is a non-profit charitable organization headquartered in San Francisco, California, United States, and organized under the laws of the state of Florida, where it was initially based...
was formally announced on June 20, 2003, and all intellectual property and domain name assets were transferred or donated to this
non-profit organizationA nonprofit organization is an organization that does not distribute its surplus funds to owners or shareholders, but instead uses them to help pursue its goals . Examples of NPOs include charities , trade unions, and public arts organizations...
. Existing server hardware was not transferred. Larry Sanger had left the project by this time, but Jimmy Wales retains a role on the board of the Foundation, along with users elected from the Wikimedia community. The Foundation now funds the operation of Wikipedia (and its sister projects) primarily through donations from readers. Bomis CEO Tim Shell was the Vice Chair of the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation until December 2006, when he was replaced by Jan-Bart de Vreede.
External links and sources