I pretty much gave up blogging this year except for a post about a talk I gave in Sydney and two about our wedding photos and new house. Instead, I made a few hundred posts to Twitter and some to Facebook. But here’s a round-up of the year.
January
We started the year watching the incredible fireworks display on Sydney Harbour from Blues Point Reserve. We arrived late afternoon and claimed the last patch of grass for our picnic blanket. I’d seen these fireworks so many times on TV from England 11 hours before midnight! In real life, they were by far the most spectacular fireworks I have seen in my life, made up of more than 100,000 individual firework effects!
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| Photo by coquetboy from flickr |
I went to Tasmania for the first time as Tim and I attended the Linux Conference in Hobart where I gave a keynote. While we were there, I managed to lose my wedding ring down the sink and missed half a day of the conference waiting for the hotel maintenance to try and retrieve it, which luckily they did!
Our wedding photos arrived this month. You can see more on Facebook.
February
In February, I gave two talks at Media09 and at the New South Wales Knowledge Management forum.
March
2009 was a good year for Wikia, starting in March with Nielsen’s report that Wikia is the 5th fastest-growing online community.
We attended a Wiki Wednesday at Telstra where Tim gave a talk about MediaWiki.
Tim had a staff meeting in San Francisco. As Tim was going to be in Berlin in April, we both travelled to Europe at the end of March.
April
We attended a MediaWiki developers meeting in Berlin in April and then spent Easter with my family in England. I then went to Melbourne to talk about the “Future of Search” talk which was badly timed since Wikia Search had just announced its closure. We went to the comedy festival for Tim’s birthday.
May
In May we attended Wiki Wednesday at Google. We also celebrated our 6 month wedding anniversary.
Wikia was listed as a top 10 growing property on Comscore.
June
Not much happened in June outside of work. Wikia’s rich text (WYSIWYG) editor went live across most of the sites, greatly increasing the number of editors.
July
In July, we started looking for a house to buy. We initially thought about areas near Gosford but we decided to try north of Wyong and spent quite a few weekends checking out various suburbs on the Central Coast. We managing 8 viewings in a 3 hour period one Saturday!
August
I’m sure I must have done something interesting for my birthday, but according to my Google calendar, I updated some stats and had a meeting. I think at 32 my memory started to fade! I do remember that I got a huge amount of fruit from my parents which I turned into really nice banana bread.
Soon after my birthday, we drove down to Canberra for the Wikimedia GLAM event. We stopped at a beautiful historic village called Berrima on the way. I bought some tea from Mrs Oldbucks Pantry and I’ve been a tea fan ever since, cutting down to 1 coffee a day.
Later in August, we saw Patience or Hot Chocolate in Newcastle which Tim’s brother, Ben, was playing in.
Wikimania this year was in Buenos Aires, Argentina. We took a couple of extra days there to explore. We had a great time walking around the city and we also saw the Cemetery and Zoo. The flight there was great as the plane was almost empty so I finally got to use up many years of Qantas miles and upgrade us both to business class.
September
On September 20th, we bought a house at auction. It was sort of within budget though way more that we were considering when we started looking in July.
The house we were renting went up for auction the same day but didn’t sell. I found out while writing this that is has finally sold (in December). It had been on and off the market since May 2008. A change of real estate agent, along with a big tidy up of the garden, a new kitchen, and replacing the ill-fitted curtains with new blinds must have helped. I don’t know how much it sold for, but the larger house next door sold for $540,000 at around the same time. It has been advertised as “offers over $495,000″, far more than we paid for a house three times the size 90km north-east of there.
I experienced my first dust storm on the 23rd with red dust filling the air (and the house). The photos are surreal. I had no idea what it was when I woke up but of course it was a trending topic on Twitter so I soon found out.
Wikia announced profitability this month! Tim bought me champagne to celebrate.
I passed my driving test in 1994 but I’ve never owned a car, so I’ve barely driven since I left home at 19. I decided as we were moving to a suburb with no local shops that I really needed to be able to drive, so I took some refresher lessons. I still need a lot more practice. And I never could park.
October
Tim went to San Francisco again, which left me alone to pack up the house ready for the move the following week. He managed to do the same when we moved from Melbourne to Sydney. We moved on October 30th.
November
My laptop did not survive the move – being basically thrown into the back of the car rather than packed as the removalists showed up 3 hours early. So I got a new computer this month after surviving on my little EEEPC for a while.
We settled into the new house in November and finally bought a sofa. We hadn’t had one since we gave away the old one on Freecycle before leaving Melbourne two years ago! It took a few days to get the hot water and oven working, but there haven’t been any major problems. A few small things need fixing like the rangehood and the air conditioning. One problem I’m not sure is easily fixable is the shower. The water spills out of the shower instead of down the drain, presumably because the whole floor is not angled toward the drain enough.
We celebrated the move with a house warming party on a wonderfully hot day on the 21st.
The same weekend, we went into the city to watch the musical Wicked and to celebrate our first wedding anniversary.
I miss the valley views from the old house, and the wildlife. There certainly aren’t wallabies in the new garden, and I’ve not even seen a lizard so far. Instead we have a bunch of bugs. All sorts of ants, Christmas beetles, moths, and a lot of spiders. I saw my first redback spiders and learned that vacuuming up wolf spiders does not kill them.
For most of November, we lived in an almost empty street as we’d bought at auction and moved in much sooner than the others. People have since moved in to 4 of the houses.
Wikia continued to grow, reaching a new milestone of 10 million US visitors this month. Newly acquired LyricWiki reached 1 million pages and the French Wikianswers launched. As I write this, we now have almost 27 million people worldwide visiting each month, with an equivalent rank of being the 81st most popular site according to the Quantcast stats.
November marked the start of my 5th year in Australia.
December
We spent Christmas at Tim’s aunt’s house. I made a nutloaf, cranberry sauce, and chocolate & cherry pinwheels. We got some great gifts which we needed for the new house including tea, coffee, a painting, a wall hanging, and a salad set. Tim bought me a WikiReader.
We plan to spend New Year’s Eve watching the fireworks at Gosford.
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Now that I have a personal blog as well as this one, I wondered about moving my “end of year” post there, but now it’s the 3rd, it seems traditional to have it here too, so I’m cross-posting. For previous years, see end of 2006 and end of 2007.
January
Tim and I started the year at Woodford festival, camping in a rented non-waterproof tent in the rain!
February
For Valentines day, we had dinner at Green Palace, a vegetarian Thai restaurant in Newtown.
On the 18th, my grandad died at the age of 88 years.
March
I had planned to be at Wikia’s offices in San Mateo for two weeks in March. Pop’s funeral was scheduled the same time. So, after a week in California, I did a day trip to England and got back to the US on Tuesday for the rest of the week’s meetings.
Back in Sydney, Tim proposed to me on the 22nd, the day before Easter.
April
Tim and I were back in England at the start of April as I’d been invited to give a keynote at the JISC conference in Birmingham. I also gave a short talk at The Webby 5 & People’s Voice Voting party in London and we celebrated our engagement with family and friends in England.
We went back to Australia for Tim’s family reunion in Bellingen.
May
We chose our wedding cake this month. After withdrawing my previous visa application for “de-facto spouse”, I started health checks for a new application for a “prospective marriage” visa.
June
In June, Tim and I flew off in different directions. I spent a few days in Korea for the International Conference on Information Culture, and Tim went to San Francisco for a staff meeting.
Back in Australia, we had our 2nd engagement party – this time a barbecue with Tim’s family.
I also bought my wedding dress this month.
July
In July we went to Egypt for Wikimedia’s annual conference, Wikimania. We spent a few days as tourists in Cairo before getting a bus to Alexandria for the conference. Unfortunately I contracted what was probably E. coli from a dodgy salad at the Novotel at Cairo airport and spend most of the time in Alexandria extremely ill. We headed home via Abu Dhabi where we stopped for one night.
August
For the past few years, my birthday has been during Wikimania, but as that was early this year, I was able to properly celebrate and we has dinner at Rise, a Japanese restaurant in Sydney.
September
In September, we headed to New Zealand for a few days so that my visa could be granted (which had to happen out of the country). We flew into Christchurch because it was by far the cheapest flight from Sydney, and then went to the embassy in Auckland where my visa was approved.
Back in Australia we attended Tim’s 10 year school reunion.
October
Just a month to go before the wedding, but instead of working on that, Tim and I went to San Francisco. It was the first time we’d been there together! I spent the week at Wikia’s new office in San Francisco and Tim was just around the corner for more Wikimedia staff meetings.
November
We got back to Sydney just in time for Wiki Wednesday which I spoke at. A few days later my family arrived in Australia for the first time. We managed to fit in some touristy thing alongside making last minute plans for the wedding on the 23rd.
And finally a chance to relax! We had a wonderful honeymoon on Hamilton Island, part of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. Cruising, sailing, snorkelling, great food, and lots of relaxing!
December
Of course I made up for it in December by spending a busy month catching up before celebrating Christmas with Tim’s family in Bilgola.
My plans for next year include speaking at Linux Conference in Tasmania, attending Wikimania in Buenos Aires, making the final transition to Australia (my parents are still looking after all my junk and receiving lots of post for me!), buying a house, and doing all I can to make Wikia profitable for the first time!
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Sorry – I couldn’t resist the title. Those were the 4 most popular queries made at Wikia Search at the time of our pre-alpha launch in January.
Wikia Search relaunched today (see the press release). Our search team have made some amazing improvements since January. Not only does it “suck less” but it’s actually fun. Which isn’t something I usually find with search engines!
It’s unrecogniazble from the versions early in the year so do check it out again. And try clicking the header on any search results page for something unexpected…
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Tim proposed to me on Saturday night in a romantic setting outside the Sydney Opera House overlooking the Harbour Bridge.
We’re planning to get married in NSW this year, around the time of our three year anniversary.
Here’s a picture of the ring. It’s white gold with three Moissanite stones. I wanted an alternative to diamonds to avoid mining, cartels, conflicts, and marketing. Photographed sitting on the red roses Tim bought me.
And the picture below shows the location of the proposal. (Photo by Diliff, cc-by-sa)
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Thinking of writing a blog post about the Wikimedia Commons picture of the year contest reminded me I had an unpublished draft post about 2007. Like my end of 2006 post, here’s a summary of what happened last year.
January
I celebrated New Year at my sister’s house in England, with my family and Tim.
Essjay joined Wikia’s community team on January 7th. Tim and I went to a London Wikipedia meetup on the 9th.
February
I went to San Mateo for the first Wikia staff meeting in the new office. It was my first time in San Francisco. The number of people there was amazing – 36 compared to 6 the previous February. Of everything that happened there, the thing that sticks most in my mind is the “party bus” – something I just can’t sum up on my blog. Quite incredible. Drunk staff, getting more drunk while on a bus that has a disco ball. Cigars on the no-smoking bus, people climbing out of the sunroof, wheelchairs, weird people in the bar, falling off a giant chair… and there’s another one of these coming up in March!
I got back to England and took Tim to Birmingham for valentine’s day. Perhaps not the most romantic city in the world, but I have fond memories of it since I went to uni there.
Wikia was listed as one of CNN’s 25 startups to watch.
A cute article in The Age mentions that Tim and I met through Wikipedia.
March
Wikia and Wikipedia had more press attention than usual this month.
The Times had an interview with me, claiming my “world has certainly been changed by Wikipedia.” Very true. I also spoke on a radio station in Melbourne on TV in a BBC World interview later in month. A lot of the press was sadly about Essjay, who resigned from Wikia on March 4th.
Datrio, then a board member of Wikimedia Poland, moved from Wikia’s tech staff to community staff, and provided a vital connection between the two. Catherine Munro, who joined Wikipedia a week before I did, joined Wikia on March 15th, at least in part to replace Essjay.
April
In April, I took part in a panel at the British Association for American Studies conference in Leicester.
I attended a Wiki Wednesday and spoke at a Girl Geek dinner in London.
May
I went to Canada for the first time in May for the RecentChangesCamp in Montreal, en route to New York for Wikia’s product summit.
Shun Fukuzawa joined Wikia’s as our first representative in Japan. Jabber founder Jeremie Miller joined Wikia to work on Wikia Search.
June
In June I visited Wikia’s Polish office for the first time.
July
I attended another Wiki Wednesday in London and then went to Taipei for Wikimania.
August
I celebrated my 30th birthday in Taipei. I have vague memories of Wikia staff dancing on tables.
September
A quick visit to the Wikia offices in Poland and San Mateo and then finally back in Australia.
I saw wild kangaroos for the first time. There were around 100 of them in the Morisset Hospital grounds!
I spoke at Web Directions South in Sydney and attended Webjam.
October
In October, Tim went to Florida and I went to Melbourne. I spoke at a Digital Culture Forum at ACMI.
I packed up our old flat in Melbourne so we could finally move to Sydney; something we’d been planning to do since July 2006. We moved to Hornsby Heights. There are fast trains from Hornsby into the center of Sydney, and it’s far enough out of the city that we can afford to rent a two-bedroom house rather than a flat. There is an amazing variety of wildlife here as you can see from the photos on my wiki.
November
Back in Sydney, I spoke at the International Association of Business Communicators.
I’ve not blogged much this year, but my wiki is slightly more active. In November, I added the ‘Wikis you can’t edit‘ page (it’s not what you think) and started to collect photos of things I see in the yard. So far the page includes wallabies, snakes, spiders, kookaburras, parrots, cuckoos, skinks, blue-tongued lizards, peahens, cockatoos, leeches, crickets, and other insects. They’re not great photos but an interesting reminder of what I’ve seen since moving to Sydney.
December
I spoke at the Online Social Networking & Business Collaboration World in Sydney.
Tim and I flew to Queensland to spend Christmas with his family. It’s the first time I’ve been away without my laptop. I had to amuse myself by watching the carpet python on the rafters outside instead!
After Christmas, we went to the Woodford Folk Festival. It rained constantly and was extremely muddy. In the 20 minutes the sun came out, I managed to get sunburnt and bitten by a green ant. Despite that, it was very enjoyable, and a much needed break, since it was the first time since Wikia started that I’ve actually taken an entire week off!
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It’s 2 years today since I first arrived in Australia. I was here for the X|Media|Lab conference in Melbourne and I thought it might be the only time in my life I would visit Australia, so I decided to take a few days off and visit Sydney while I was here.
This was before Wikia had its first round of investment, and more than a year since I’d last had a job that paid a proper salary, so I stayed in the cheapest hostel I could find in the not-so delightful area of King’s Cross. The next day, I met the Sydney Wikipedians for what is still my best ever Wikipedia meetup. They took me on a great tour of the city, seeing the Town Hall, the Royal Botanical Gardens, the Opera House, and the Harbour Bridge.
Two years later, I’m still here! So much for it being my only visit. I’ve now arrived in Australia 10 times and I’m living in Sydney. I came back to Australia a couple of weeks after the conference and moved in with Tim Starling. We’re now renting a house in Hornsby Heights with beautiful bushland views and wallabies in our garden.
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I’m not sure I want 2006 to end. It’s been a great year.
Here’s what happened:
January
I spent New Year with my family in England after spending my first Christmas away, with Tim in NSW. At the start of January, I visited Florida for the first time and spent a couple of weeks at the office Wikia and Wikimedia were sharing in St. Petersburg. This was when Wikia got its first round of investment. The news was leaked in February and announced in March (blog post). Tim and Kate temporarily joined Wikia’s technical team.
February
The $4m from Wikia’s first investment round allowed me to hire the first two Wikia Community Team members, sannse and Mindspillage, in February.
March
In March, I visited Austria for the Content for Competitiveness conference in Vienna. Back in Australia, I visited Perth for the first time and met Mark Ryan from Wikipedia and Tim’s sister. Wikicities rebranded as “Wikia” and finally announced the first round of investment.
April
I made another trip to the US in April for the very interesting Forum on Digital Transition in Santa Barbara. That was followed by the smallest Wikipedia meetup I’ve been to since only one other person (Antandrus) showed up! I was back in Australia for Easter and Tim’s birthday. KaurJmeb joined Wikia’s community team and John Q Smith joined Wikia’s technical team to lead ops, support, and development.
May
Tim visited England for the first in May. We stopped off for a two day trip to Hong Kong on the way.
My first nephew, Alex, was born in May whilst I was in England. The book I part-authored, Wikis: Tools for Information Work And Collaboration, was published in May. Back in Australia, we attempted to find a new place to live but never got round to moving. Emil Podlaszewski, Wikia’s new head of product development in Poland, was introduced to Wikia but didn’t actually start until later in the year. The Polish team has been expanding every month since.
June
I attended the iX conference in Singapore and appeared on TV for the first time, doing three televised interviews about Wikipedia whilst I was in Asia. Gil Penchina officially became Wikia’s CEO this month and Rieke and Solensean joined Wikia’s community team. I resigned from the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation after a bad decision by the rest of the Board. WikiZine made my resignation public in July and it took effect in September when Erik Möller was elected to replace me.
July
I went to the Brisbane for the first time for the Students of Sustainability conference. Splarka joined Wikia’s community team as an intern. Bill Kaufman joined Wikia as head of verticals. Wikia had a lot of press regarding Jimmy’s launch of the Campaigns Wikia.
August
My third trip to the US this year was for Wikimania (blog post), Wikimedia’s second annual conference, which was held at Harvard. Tim and I stopped in New York for a few days before it and I rushed back after it for the X|Media|Lab event in Melbourne – it was last year’s event in November which led to me staying in Australia so it was great to be there again. I fitted in a second trip to Brisbane this month, for an Open Innovation Round Table discussion. Next in August, I made a very long trip to Denmark for WikiSym where I gave a keynote on how and why Wikipedia works. Then it was back to Melbourne to talk about Future Directions for Free Content at the Churchill Club (blog post). Mindspillage and Solensean left Wikia this month and Splarka joined as a permanent staff member.
September
Juan David joined Wikia’s community team. Tim was ill for most of September and needed surgery so it was an otherwise quiet month.
October
I made few plans for the rest of the year since Tim and I weren’t sure when we’d be going to England, but events nearby kept me busy. I visited Brisbane for the third time, this time to talk about Copyright Challenges and User Generated Technologies. I went to Canberra the next day to take part in the Digital Culture series of talks at the National Library of Australia and then attended James Dellow’s Rebooting the Enterprise talk before returning to Melbourne.
November
We’d hoped to leave for England before November but it was too soon after Tim’s operation for him to fly so far, though we did fly to NSW for Tim’s mother’s birthday. The English Wikipedia reached 1.5 million articles.
December
Wikia’s first big announcement this month was the acquisition of ArmchairGM. Robert Lefkowitz, Aaron Wright, Dan Lewis and David Pean joined Wikia as part of the acquititsion and began work on OpenServing (blog post). Wikia announced its second round of investment – all of it from Amazon – on December 8th (blog post). We had two big hits in the press shortly after this – firstly with OpenServing which is still in testing, and will be more widely available very soon, and secondly with “Wikiasari“, which didn’t really exist before the press made it up, but may well exist at some point next year. 
I started WikiChix, a new community for women involved with wikis, in response to concerns that women were not comfortable posting to Wikipedia’s mailing lists. Anthere invited me to chair Wikimedia’s new Advisory Board. After attending the fun Stirr Sydney event, I packed up and left Australia, at least temporarily. We spent a day and a half in London before going to see my parents. Tim spent his first Christmas away from home, with my family, and we’ll be spending new year’s at my sister’s.
2007
My New Year’s resolution is to make no plans. I don’t know if or when I’ll be back in Australia and I have no idea where Wikia will be in a year from now. I wouldn’t have predicted a year ago that we’d now have 40 staff, two rounds of investment, 60000 registered users, and more than 400000 articles, so I’m not attempting to predict next year. I just hope it’s as amazing as this year was.
Happy New Year!
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Finally a reason to meet Erik’s odd suggestion that WikiAngela should contain hippos. The millionth file has been uploaded to the Wikimedia Commons and it’s a picture of hippos at Singapore Zoo by Terence Ong! See my previous post about the mosaic created to celebrate this milestone.
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The critically endangered Kanab Ambersnail became the 1500000th article on the English Wikipedia on November 24th, almost 10 months after the Scottish Jordanhill railway station became the millionth. Uncyclopedia have their own version with Kanab Ambersnail as an environmental activist from Utah.
Other recent Wikipedia milestones include the German Wikipedia reaching 500,000 and the Czech Wikipedia reaching 50,000 articles. The French Wikipedia will soon reach 400,000 and the Commons will soon reach 1 million uploads. The English Wikipedia will also pass 100 million edits soon (though those stats don’t count the first 18 months of the project).
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Wikia has passed a new milestone of 20 featured wikis. These wikis are nominated and voted on by the Wikia community and then featured on the home page for around a month. Featured wikis serve as good examples for the new wikis to learn from. For example, the wiki might show great support for newcomers, fast membership growth, a creative use of categories, innovative templates, or the best use of various wiki techniques and practices. Thanks to CocoaZen, who has been doing a great job of organising the featured wiki process since it started in early 2005.
Here is Wikia’s official top 20, from the most recent to the oldest:
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