Wikia magazines; Facebook gifts; Stumble Video for your Wii; Yahoo "copies" Digg

The social web weekly: a quick-fire roundup of some of the news, announcements and conversations that have occurred throughout the week...

• Wikia launches magazine-style wikis. Jimmy Wales' company, Wikia, has unveiled three wiki-driven community sites for politics, entertainment, and local interests. Wikia says it plans to roll out additional communities over the coming months. It will be interesting to see how the wiki approach works when applied to a 'magazine' format, and how the sites deal with spam or libelous content.
• Facebook gifts. Last week the social networking site, Facebook, added functionality which lets its users purchase and give each other gifts, which are described as "tiny tokens of appreciation, that live on your profile." Danah Boyd gives a great analysis of the social dynamics that might make micro payment-based "gifts", viable. But with regards to Facebook's efforts, Boyd concludes, "I don't think Facebook gifts - in its current incarnation - is sustainable. You can only gift so many kisses and rainbows before it's meaningless... to make it work long-term, they need to understand gifting a bit better. It's about status. It's about scarcity. It's about reciprocity and upping the ante."
• StumbleVideo comes to the Wii. The video version of the social bookmarking and discovery service, StumbleUpon, has been re-designed so that it's suitable for viewing through Nintendo's Wii. Not only is this cool but it makes sense to let users view video content from their couch.
• Yahoo copies Digg or does it? When Yahoo launched its own user-feedback forums, utilizing Digg-style voting (the wisdom of the crowds), then the stupidity of the mobs kicked in, with many Digg users accusing the company of "stealing" the Digg concept -- with some going as far as vandalizing Yahoo's new 'Suggestion Boards". Jason Calacanis fights back, saying that Digg didn't invent voting (he's right), and that the whole tech industry is based on "build[ing] off each others ideas".