AboutUs.org is a wiki Internet domain directory. It lists websites along with information about their content. As a wiki, AboutUs allows Internet users to add entries or modify information.

Ray King created AboutUs with a staff of five people in Portland, Oregon, United States. The staff has since expanded to more than thirty people and two continents with an office in Lahore, Pakistan. In May 2007, Ward Cunningham joined AboutUs, as its chief technology officer.

Website contents

There are more than ten million entries on AboutUs.org as of December, 2007. Most entries were created by a web robot (bot); web searches by users direct the bot to create a page for a web domain. In many cases the content is simply a republication of the contents of the "About us", "About me", or similar page on the website. Such pages typically describe the entity that owns the site, and may include self-promotional information, which AboutUs.org does not restrict. In many other cases the content of an entry consists of the whois data for the website.

Data use

Some websites that analyze domains and traffic link to AboutUs.org as a point of extra reference. Notably, the "Whois" site DomainTools now references the Aboutus.org listing along with standard server information, domain ownership and history, and extra data. AboutUs has also referenced whois data content from the registrars Network Solutions and Register.com.

Malware domains

To prevent users from going to Malware domains editors work with McAfee Siteadvisor and PHSDL to identiry Malware domains. Once a Malware domain is identified a warning AboutUs MalwareSite template is placed to warn users.

Criticisms

AboutUs has received some criticism from within the blogosphere, and most critics centre on issues concerning the data AboutUs publishes within its pages for domain names.Privacy

Some website owners dislike the publication of the contact information for the website owner or domain name registrant. Although this information is publicly available from other sources, AboutUs makes it available in a searchable format, making it more easily accessible to the public. AboutUs has responded to this criticism by discontinuing its former practice of rendering phone numbers in text format, instead rendering the phone number of the registrant in an image format. However, other personal information such as names and addresses are still displayed in plain text making them available to anyone including bots, without the explicit permission of the site owner.Republishing

Some site owners complain about AboutUs' practice of republishing copyrighted contents from 'about us' pages. AboutUs.org takes an image and sampling of random text and republishes it. AboutUs.org defends this by saying Google and Alexa do the same thing, by extracting a part of a website for publishing in a search. In this regard, AboutUs.org are a good example of a Web Scraper whereby they copy content from existing websites in order to generate content for their own site. This initial method of populating their pages does not constitute a Wiki as it is not manually entered. This kind of automation can lead to plagiarism and legal issues with regard to breaking the terms and conditions of harvested sites.

Funding

In November 2006, AboutUs closed initial financing round for one million dollars.