• Red Herring, Wednesday, December 13, 2006 11:04 AM

Startup Wikia is creating a new open source initiative that would create a completely wiki-based media company. Called Open Serving, the new project will give authors free, managed hosting space with the aim of building communities around particular topics of interest. It will also provide a free collaborative news blog, customer support and let them keep revenue from ad sales.

Gil Penchina, the new company's CEO, said he had no idea how Open Serving would make money. But by creating a new platform based on open source code for a generation of publishers, Penchina hopes to create the next publishing powerhouse.

"If we build this right we could be the next Time Warner," he said earlier this week at a conference in Paris. The company will use software from a grassroots news site called ArmChairGM, a sports-fan community site it recently purchased.

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