Last minute reprieve for Biographicon

We’re keeping the Biographicon online while we seek options that would allow the Biographicon to continue.  We’re probably going to try to find a buyer for the site and its software.  More details later.

Thank you very much for your support.

Biographicon closing

We regretfully report that we will be shutting the site down permanently on August 21, owing to insufficient user interest in the site.  We thank everyone who has supported us, particularly our users.

If you would like to get a copy of your biography after August 21, please email us at info@biographicon.com.

Biographicon is live again

We are up and live again at (as always) biographicon.com.

According to our hosting provider, there is some chance that we’ll have some spotty uptime for a few more hours.  After that everything should be back to normal.  Please email us at info@biographicon.com if you have any trouble accessing our site.

We’re sorry for the downtime.

Biographicon server down

We’re sorry to report that the Biographicon is temporarily out of service. Due to an explosion and fire at the company where our server is located, we’ve been down now for over 24 hours. We apologize for this. The latest we have heard is that service may be restored sometime tonight. We will make status updates here.

Please contact us at info@biographicon.com if you have any questions.

UPDATE: the hosting company is now saying that our server might be up by tomorrow morning. We’ll update again when we know more.

Twitter

We haven’t mentioned it here before, but we’ve got a Twitter account.  If you haven’t heard of Twitter, it’s a short message service/medium.  Kind of fun.  Here’s the Biographicon twitter: http://twitter.com/biographicon

Biographicon in blogs

Today I’m going to thank some bloggers who have written about us since we launched on March 1. Some of these posts came two months ago, but we think it’s important to make mention of them – better late than never.

First, I’d like to thank Michael Arrington for excellent coverage on Techcrunch. He got it right, except that instead of “Wikipedia For The Non-Notable Masses”, we aim to be the place for everyone’s biography. So we’ll even let in the people Wikipedia calls “notable”.

KillerStartups.com says ‘Biographicon is a fun resource for those that want their story out there. It is like facebook without restriction…’

Nicole Ferraro of InternetEvolution says: “Barring its early success as a platform for people to talk about themselves at length, Biographicon could possibly crop up as the next big thing for the self-absorbed, tech-savvy masses.”

TechBuzz: ‘Think of it like a cross between social networks and the wiki model… I love their interface, and the simplicity to create biographies and add information to it.’

Clipotech ‘New Y Combinator startup Biographicon, founded by CEO Ethan Herdrick and CTO Daniel Terhorst, aims to fit itself somewhere in between Wikipedia and LinkedIn.’

Techdirt ‘…a site that touts itself as a site “for everyone’s biography.”‘

AppScout “You can edit sections of biography entries on the spot, unlike at Wikipedia…”

Life Beyond Code “…if you can’t get into Wikipedia, no problem – you can get into Biographicon.”

The Daily Texan blog: “Thanks to Biographicon, I can seize back my 15 minutes of fame and feel the warmth of sweet spotlight again.”

HispaMP3: “En Biographicon cualquier usuario registrado puede crear biografias nuevas o modificar las existentes.” (O sea, cualquier usario. No hay que registrar. -Ethan)

The Iranian blogs NAP Team (Farsi) and dom.IR Persian blog (also Farsi) are especially visually appealing, due to the presence of all that lovely Farsi. It turns out that Farsi biographies have a particularly distinguished look on Biographicon. We’d love to see more Iranians on the site.

And we were linked to by many other non-English blogs, most of which, unfortunately, we don’t understand: Sicrono (Spanish), the very popular Italian tech blog Geekissimo, DElyMyth (Italian), MyTech (Italian), Loogic (Spanish), and the Digg of Latvia (Latvian, naturally). Also, Francisco José Hidalgo Rodríguez of Genbeta (Spanish), and Danielle Martinelli blogged (Italian) us. One of our first, and biggest, non-English links was from the Chinese blog, JetLi (perhaps not affiliated with Jet Li).

Tom Sowa of Spokane’s Spokesman-Review TXT blog says, “Sounds brilliant.” That’s nice to read; the Spokesman-Review is practically my hometown newspaper, as I grew up in eastern Washington state.

Catherine Rampell in the Wired Campus blog of the Chronicle of Higher Education: “Give them your tired, your poor, your unknown masses yearning to be famous. Biographicon, a new start-up based out of San Jose, is a sort of Wikipedia for unknown people, mixed in with a splash of Facebook.”

redditAll blog: reddit founder Alexis Ohanian linked to the reddit alien’s biography on the occasion of its birthday.

Untyped, the (lovely) blog of our friends at the leading Scheme custom development shop, called us “a very pretty web site of user contributed biographies.”

The widely read ArsTechnica profiled us, saying: “Enter Biographicon, a wiki site set up with the express purpose of hosting biographies for every person on the planet who wants one, then drawing connections between those people.”

Digg’s front page featured the Biographicon for a few hours, as the ArsTechnica post (see above) accumulated 642 “Diggs”. And it wasn’t the Latvian Digg this time! It was the famous one! There was a comment at DIgg that we especially liked. Check it out.

The Cracked blog: “It’s the Wikipedia for people who would otherwise never make it into Wikipedia…” This has been an impressive source of traffic for us. Cracked is pretty big, people.

NewCommbiz.com: “I’m so doing this. I’ve often thought it would be cool to have a wiki entry to list all the stuff that Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn don’t cover.”

Standard Society: “An incredibly simple and beautiful way to record your own Biography, gain some link love, and share your story with the world. Seriously go check it out.”

Giles Turnbull at The Birmingham Post (UK) gets the final word: “Go on, add yourselves!”

Biographicon’s new blog

Hi folks! We’re the Biographicon: the place for biographies, including yours. This is our blog. We’ll be using it to communicate with our users and friends.

Until now, we had been using a handrolled “Site News” hosted on our server to act as a sort of blog, but we found that most of what we wanted to blog about didn’t really fit there. Even more importantly, we took to heart Michael Arrington’s advice (viewable on Omnisio) on the subject of staying in touch with the people around us and the web community. We felt that a good blogging service like WordPress would be the way to do this right.

Hope to see you on the site and here on the blog!

Chronicle of Higher Education covers the Biographicon

OK, so it wasn’t the printed version of the Chonicle. Instead, it was a well-done post by respected journalist Catherine Rampell on their “Wired Campus” blog.  To our new users from the Chronicle, welcome! Let us know what you think.

Biographicon kills bugs

While you’re enjoying the new community pages, we’d like to mention something else we did today: we fixed a bug. It’s true, the Biographicon did not emerge, fully formed and flawless at the moment of its birth! In fact, we’ve fixed a number of bugs since we launched. If you’re familiar with software then this is nothing surprising, but this one bug really was an interesting one. We’re going to make a technical blog post about this sometime soon and you’ll be able to read about it there if you’re into that kind of thing. If not, happy Biographiconating!

New community pages

Today we added a community area. We decided that Biographicon people need a central place to meet and discuss things so as to function more like like a community and less like atomized individuals. So we put a place for discussions about the site, and a list of the most recent changes to biographies here. Tell us what you think of it, as always, at info@biographicon.com. Better, just go there and post a discussion thread.