Wikipedia for Human Beings or a Privacy Breach?

San Francisco, CA (openhuman.org) Dec 11, 2006 - The popular web site that gained quick momentum in open source - geek community after being Slashdotted (the term meaning reviewed by the crowd that makes up the opensource/geek Slashdot.org community). OpenHuman.org was flooded by thousands of requests coming from slashdot geeks flooding to the site to opensource facts about their lives. The site received, in a very short amount of time, wiki pages that depict their naked pictures and some very intimate details. The motto is "open source yourself" and wants to be a Wikipedia for human beings.

The founder's blog (http://emresokullu.com) defines openhuman.org as a movement, more than a project or simply a web site and claims that privacy is obsolete in the age of blogs, MySpace, LinkedIn, Meetup and Flickr. From this perspective, openhuman.org can be seen comparable to a cyber version hippie movement of 70's. Although the site has been live for a few week, more than 2000 geeks have already responded to Emre Sokullu's call for openness and self expression. Meanwhile, some geeks who chose to sign up, use their rights of self expression on the site by calling the site "terrifying" amidst a recent trend of privacy concerns. The site, reportedly (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/openhuman/message/89) been banned in Iraqi base of US troops.

Besides aforementioned features, site also offers you to build communities around the keywords . The site has a special technology that detects special keywords on your page and can indicate people sharing similar interests or problems. Also site assigns links to each fact you enter so that you can share them in other web sites as well.

Just like Wikipedia, OpenHuman also releases their database dumps freely available to everyone in the hope that they may be helpful in future scientific researches.

It's interesting to see how wide the open source movement can go.. We were familiar with open source code, coke, hardware, beer but this one undoubtedly takes it one step ahead.

About OpenHuman.org
OpenHuman.org is a self-expression experiment started in November, 2006. The project quickly reached more than 2000 people. The interesting point is that the unlike most of the conventional web sites, sources codes and database dumps of openhuman.org site are freely available. The author, Emre Sokullu, a Turkish computer scientist heading his own startup Grou.ps in San Francisco, CA, wants everyone to experiment with this idea locally, in their school and communities. From this point of view, OpenHuman can be compared with MySpace as what Linux is to Windows. The project has a large developer community from Poland to California, all around the world, coordinated openly using mailing lists at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/openhuman