An online notebook
I’m a regular reader of David Wilcox‘s blog, and if you aren’t at the moment, you should be. His posts are full of great stuff.
He’s also the editor of a wiki which is chock-full of useful social media information. A recommended bookmark for future reference for sure.
The wiki system David is using looks good: wikispaces. I hadn’t come across it before but it looks like a good competitor to the likes of Wetpaint, pbWiki, Stikipad and others…
Penguin, the publishers, have unleashed a cool idea: a novel written on a wiki. There’s a blog just for the project, too. Great that they are using open source tools: WordPress and MediaWiki.
The main Penguin blog (Typepad, boo) notes that:
Over the next six weeks we want to see whether a community can really get together, put creative differences aside (or sort them out through discussion) and produce a novel. We honestly don’t know how this is going to turn out – it’s an experiment. Some disciplines rely completely on collaboration, while others – the writing of a novel, for example – have traditionally been the work of an individual working in isolation. But with collaboration, crowdsourcing and the ‘wisdom of the crowds’ being buzz words du jour, we thought we might as well see if these new trends can be applied to a less obvious sphere than, say, software development.
Fair play to them.
[tags]penguin, a million penguins, wiki[/tags]
Amazon have launched a new site, Amapedia, which is a wiki for products. Nice idea.
Effectively, it gives people a chance to write about the stuff they like which can be bought from Amazon. I guess that means writing about stuff you hate is possible too. What makes the whole site extra cool is the use of tags to help you find related stuff
The guys at Read/WriteWeb have it summed up pretty well:
The site looks pretty raw currently and has little info in it – it is after all brand new. But a wikipedia for products makes perfect sense for Amazon. Who better to spotlight products and gather product information from the community, than Amazon? Another way to look at this: Amapedia could become the next generation of user reviews. User reviews on websites today are relatively rigid and old fashioned, so Amazon may be thinking that Amapedia will be a new platform for user reviews – it may help remove redundancy in reviews, while offering more completeness.
Wetpaint is a hosted wiki service – more like Wikia than PBwiki, in that it’s probably suited to community sites. The difference between Wetpaint and Wikia though, is that Wetpaint looks good.
Mike Arrington and Zoli Erdos both mention it today, which is how I came by it. Arrington reports the $9.5 million funding they’ve just received. He goes on:
Wetpaint’s key competitor, Wikia, has had more traction with users according to Alexa and Compete statistics, and claims 2.5 million page views per day. Wetpaint doesn’t disclose page views, but CEO Ben Elowitz told me they are “doubling quicker than every 2 months.” Wetpaint has a much more newbie-friendly user interface than Wikia, and is targeting a different audience. Frankly, it’s just a lot more pleasant to look at a typical Wetpaint site than a Wikia one, although the content on Wikia is often much deeper than the equivalent on Wetpaint. Wetpaint says they now have 150,000 unique wikis and over 2.5 million pieces of content contributed by users since launching last June.
Zoli adds his thoughts:
Wetpaint isn’t really just a wiki, it’s a wiki – blog – forum hybrid. Even novice users can just happily type away and create attractive pages with photos, videos, tagging …etc. without the usual learning curve. These pages can be shared, other users can contribute, entire communities can grow and thrive – in fact that’s what it’s all about: online community creation.
So what’s it like? Great! It’s dead simple to sign up to create a new wiki, and it also makes it easy to add all sorts of content. You can see some of the sort of things that are possible at Wetpaint Central, the support wiki.
There are plenty of templates you can choose from, including text pages, photo galleries, calendars, schedules and event details. Every page can be commented on, so a sense of community interaction is easy to achieve.
I can think of plenty of uses to put Wetpaint to. Heartily recommended.
Here. Download it while you can!
[tags]jimmy wales, wikipedia, bbc, 5live[/tags]