It's not everyday that a Tufts alumnus makes national headlines - especially when it comes to the sports world.
But this year, the holiday season brought a generous gift and an even greater opportunity for former Jumbos Aaron Wright (LA '02) and Dan Lewis (LA '00).
Along with friends David Pean and Rob Lefkowitz, the duo teamed up this fall to create ArmchairGM, a sports Web site devoted to cultivating a community of users by relying on user-generated content, such as blogs and polls.
"There are a lot of people blogging everyday and no one reads it or comments on it," Wright said. "And we wanted something that more people could read, so we developed a model where people can publish work and write once a week, once a month, or even once a year. We tailored the blogs to specific topics and made it easy for people to include stats for their articles and we included internal links."
The idea of blogging is not so new to most internet users, but the concept of providing a user-friendly forum for these sports-crazy bloggers is attracting attention in both the media and business worlds.
"The whole model is to put bloggers all together," Lewis said. "Everyone is both a reader and writer for everyone."
Interest in the team's new ideas led Wikia - a for-profit site launched by Wikipedia mastermind Jimmy Wales in Nov. 2004, used to cover topics outside the realm of an encyclopedia's scope - to ink a two-million dollar deal with the men on Dec. 11, adding ArmchairGM to its expanding enterprise. Supported by an investment from Amazon in early December, Wikia's acquiring ArmchairGM should be the first step of many in its venture to buy and host hundreds of freely licensed software packages.
Not only did Wikia purchase a new site, but perhaps more importantly, it also obtained four new employees with ideas that may change the conventional composition of the magazine and newspaper businesses.
"If you think about what a magazine provides - opinion and news on a regular basis, knowledge-based and encyclopedic general information, and distribution and fact-checking - we replicated that, but we did it without a central editor," Wright said. "Everyone can be an editor. Anyone can send in an opinion and anyone can edit any pages."
The site's users can post blogs, comments and votes, which allow the community to select the best content for the home page.
"On the front page [of the site] are the best articles, the most popular ones," Wright said. "Once an article hits the front page, more people will read it. And the more stuff we get, the higher the quality it is. We build momentum that way. This decentralizes the whole process of news-making."
Working for Wikia, the team hopes to expand this concept to other arenas beyond sports, such as entertainment, politics, music, law, dining, and religion, with sights set on ultimately broadening the medium to a global scale through the incorporation of other languages.
Both Wright and Lewis' interest in the web began while they attended Tufts. After taking a job with the ExCollege, Wright started building Web sites for Tufts departments. But it was Lewis' initial interest in blogs that started the two down this particular path.
"Dan was always talking about blogs all the time before they really became popular," Wright said. "I slowly came around, and I'm a big Internet junkie now."
Still, their interest in the Internet was purely a hobby, as Wright and Lewis both attended and graduated from the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in 2005. Using that background, Wright and Lefkowitz put together a Wiki site for law professionals in November.
"We wanted to make it a jumping-off point for lawyers," Lewis said. "We started it and got good press. We were telling all of our friends about it, and then we decided to start a sports one. We set it up and started developing and extending it, and it turned it into a hodgepodge of stuff where you can write stories, with the best stories filtering to the top."
Interestingly, that hodgepodge expanded much in the way it originated: from a spontaneous idea.
"I was actually sitting in temple on Yom Kippur and it just popped into my head," Wright said. "And I kept telling everyone about it."
As it turns out, sharing his idea was the best thing he could have done. Wright will join Lewis, Pean, and Lefkowitz as full-time Wikia employees.
"This is completely unexpected," Wright said. "We did it on the side because we thought it would be fun."
