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SWiK, the Popular Online Community for Open Source Projects, Shows Significant Traffic Gains

Posted on: Tuesday, 24 January 2006, 12:00 CST

SEATTLE, Jan. 24 /PRNewswire/ -- SourceLabs, a Seattle-based provider of Dependable Open Source Systems and premium support and maintenance subscriptions for enterprise IT organizations, today announced that SWiK (http://www.swik.net/), its community-based catalog of open source projects, continues to experience strong momentum with month-over-month traffic tripling in November 2005 and then doubling again in December 2005. Interested parties can see this dramatic gain of over 500% in the last three months by viewing a graph of SWiK's Alexa Internet traffic ranking at: http://www.sourcelabs.com/?page=company&sub=swikstats .

According to SourceLabs program manager Alex Bosworth, the creator and designer of SWiK, the top five things people are using SWiK for are:

-- Finding Open Source projects related to something they are working on. -- Finding news about a project by reading developer blogs. -- Collaborating on developer documentation. -- Publicizing their Open Source projects. -- Viewing the newest information on a category of Open Source projects.

"SWiK community members are the driving force behind SWiK's success," said Bosworth. "I am watching with amazement as I see the interesting and creative things people are doing in SWiK. It has become a very lively and vital Open Source community."

Alex Bosworth's Top Picks on SWiK

Bosworth recently selected his top three picks of projects that are shining examples of what users can do in SWiK and they are:

-- LiveMarks for the way it shows how SWiK can be used to find existing Open Source projects and remix them into cool new Open Source projects. Also for the way it shows off the blogging capabilities of SWiK with the LiveMarks news blog. -- Rails for the way it shows off the ability of SWiK to aggregate various developer feeds using a project. And for the way it shows the latest news and helpful information about using the project. -- MythDora for the way it shows the wide scope of SWiK. Small but active projects are a big part of what makes SWiK what it is. MythDora also shows how it fits into the larger world of projects. By being tagged, it can be found on http://swik.net/MythTV+Fedora-Core , the tag page that combines projects that are tagged "MythTV" and "Fedora-Core." MythDora also shows off other similar projects, even on a small scale, such as Knoppix.

SWiK users have the opportunity to nominate "Best of SWiK" projects in the community at: http://swik.net/SWiK/Best+of+SWiK . SourceLabs also recently introduced a new SWiK interface and the new Zeitgeist feature which shows the most edited projects, most recently added projects and "Prolific Editors."

SourceLabs provides SWiK as a service to promote the use and adoption of Open Source software. A unique attribute of SWiK is its wiki functionality, which allows anyone to edit or re-structure information or add comments. It also offers RSS syndication and tagging tools to create an intuitive and useful online community to help users find, discover and exchange information about Open Source projects.

About SourceLabs

SourceLabs, based in Seattle, Washington, provides the complete set of software integration, testing, support and maintenance services required to deliver dependable open source systems. The company's Dependable Open Source Systems vision proposes a new model for the software industry, one that frees software buyers from proprietary lock-in while delivering highly reliable software and support. For more information, please go to http://www.sourcelabs.com/.

NOTE: SourceLabs is a trademark of SourceLabs Inc. All other trademarks and trade names are the property of their respective owners.

SourceLabs

CONTACT: Cornelius Willis of SourceLabs, +1-206-322-0099, ext. 103, orcornelius@sourcelabs.com

Web site: http://www.sourcelabs.com/

Source: PRNewswire

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