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7 اغسطس 2005
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Maariv, business supplement
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And here are the main points first
Avner Avrahami and Avi Shaked want to create "a synopsis of human knowledge on the Internet" – and, if possible, make a buck or two. And so was born the Shvoong Web site.
By Dror Globerman
Today's school children are convinced that they were the ones to invent copying papers via e-mail, and scanning homework from the previous year; but for their parents, it all boils down to a single codeword – "Duvshani." Avner Avrahami and Avi Shaked studied together for their bagrut (matriculation) examinations, some 35 years ago, with the held of the synopses published by Menashe Duvshani, whose summaries turned huge obstacles, such as "War and Peace," into use-friendly booklets. Today, Avrahami admits, Duvshani and his synopses are the inspiration for the enterprise they have established, a "global Duvshani" of sorts – a huge, free-of-charge data bank of abstracts of books, scientific articles and press clippings in 34 languages. The abstracts will be written and submitted by the surfers themselves, who will also rate the material sent in by others. Writers of high-quality and popular abstracts will receive a percentage of royalties generated from advertising on the site.
Avrahami, a former Maariv reporter who today, together with photographer Reli Avrahami, his wife, writes the Family Affair column, that appears in the Haaretz Friday magazine, thought of the idea some four years ago already. "I am interested in many fields, and when I look for something, I run into so many search results, which, themselves, are also something of a wild goose chase," he explains. "I decided that what the world needs is a site of synopses."
Some three years ago, Avrahami shared his idea with his friend, Shaked, for the first time. "While I was trying to make a living from journalism, he had succeeded in creating new worlds and had become a very wealthy man, as a partner in the on-line gambling site www.888.com," Avrahami relates.
The idea was kicked around but failed to get off the ground for another two years or so, until last November, when the two began to turn it into a reality. Avrahami is behind the philosophy; Shaked provides the business concept and the cash.
The enterprise, which earned the name Shvoong (www.shvoong.com), proposes, no less, to provide "a synopsis of human knowledge." It plans to include from surfers tens and hundreds of thousands of abstracts of books and articles on all subjects, in 34 languages, and facilitate free access to readers. So how is it different from an encyclopedia? "We do not write about terms or people," Avrahami explains. "But instead, we invite surfers to publish abstracts of books and scientific articles in three different text-length formats – 300, 600, and 900 words. The goal is to get to a point at which whoever writes an abstract will be able to earn money."
The money paid to the writers will come from the "contextual" advertisements incorporated into the site – like Google's AdSense mechanism, and Amazon's similar contextual advertising solution. Every time a surfer opens an abstract and clicks on an advertisement, money will be paid from the advertiser to Google, and from Google to Shvoong, which will share 10 percent of its revenues with the writers of the synopses, based on their popularity (by the way, fake clicks can be identified and are not counted).
"Any book can be summarized. We already have an abstract of the Bible," Avrahami boasts proudly. "We believe that the public that reads and judges the abstracts will cause the good ones to float and the bad ones to disappear. We trust in the Internet's evolutionary ability to do the filtering. We believe the site will draw in many surfers, and the writers of academic papers too. They'll be able to publish their synopses on our site, because as things stand now, they are of no practical use aside from being an introduction. If a student uses us to publish abstracts he has written, for a ma'doctoral thesis, with a link to the full thesis that is presented in some data bank, he can give people the option of paying him for the right to view it."
And what do they do with the abstracts that are sent to the site? "We don't touch them," Avrahami says.
The issue of copyrights in such an enterprise is rather complex – because of the need to ensure that an abstract does not belong to someone else. A surfer who submits an abstract is obliged to sign a declaration attesting to the fact that he/she indeed wrote it. Moreover, the abstract is put through a search mechanism designed to ensure that no identical text exists on the Net. But no one has any plans to correct or edit the abstracts.
Isn't the dot.com aroma of the enterprise a little worrying? "We'll get together once the aroma has dissipated," laughs Shvoong managing director Eyal Rivlin. "There is something very unique here in the sense of the global expansion through the dozens of languages. The business model is indeed dot.com in character, but just look at how many abstracts have already been submitted into the data bank." |
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