During an interesting lunch conversation with Brian Pontarelli (more about him and his company in a separate posting, probably tomorrow), I learned about an interesting new business/website called WikiBios.com.

The basic idea is that if I write my own bio, on my own website, there’s no particular reason for anyone else to believe it; at the very least, it’s likely to be somewhat biased. And in the worst case, it may be a complete fabrication. Wouldn’t you be more inclined to trust a person’s biography if it was collectively written and edited by that person’s circle of friends and associates … and, by extension, his business colleagues, his family members, and anyone else who has ever interacted with him?

That’s the basic idea, and it’s built with the overall “wiki” approach that we’ve seen manifested with so many other wikis, including Wikipedia. Indeed, Wikipedia already has some of the elements of Wikibios, in the form of “traditional” community-written bios of famous people and current celebrities. But it’s not as user-friendly as WikiBios.com and it’s unlikely that “ordinary” people would think of it as a vehicle for getting their own bio published.

WikiBios is fairly new; indeed, the website says that it’s still a beta offering. I can imagine the concept working fairly well in a normal, rational environment; but I can also imagine it degenerating into some fairly nasty personal attacks by someone’s competitors, former girlfriends or ex-husbands, customers or employees who feel they’ve been cheated or screwed. There’s a FAQ page on the WikiBios web site that addresses some of these issues, but I think we’ll have to wait a few more months, if not years, to see how well it actually works.

I haven’t figured out the WikiBios people expect to make any money from their site, since it’s entirely free, and there’s no evidence of advertising. But that may be something they’re planning after they finish the beta phase of their development effort. In any case, it’s their problem, not mine.