Amazon
has just released a new Wikipedia clone, called Amapedia.
It's described as "a community for sharing information about the products
you like the most." So far Amapedia has had no promotion from Amazon, but
it was discovered today by
Rogers Cadenhead. Anyone with an Amazon.Com account can edit the site. Regarding the name, Amapedia appears to be a combo of the words Amazon and Wikipedia:
ama[zon][wiki]pedia.
Note that this is a different wiki product than what Alex Iskold was referring to in yesterday's post, on Amazon's use of tags, ajax, blogs and wikis. In that post we were discussing the ProductWiki feature, but it states on Amapedia's homepage that "Amapedia is the next generation of Amazon.com’s ProductWiki feature; all of your previous ProductWiki contributions were preserved and now live here."
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.
We'd like to see a bit more structure in the Amapedia pages, so that it is less chaotic when people edit it. For example add sections to pages. But the fact that tags are there already is fantastic - Amazon is calling this "collaborative structured tagging". Check it out and let us know what you think.
Listed below are links to blogs that reference this entry: Amazon Quietly Launches Amapedia, a Wikipedia For Products.
TrackBack URL for this entry: http://www.readwriteweb.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/1910
Wikipedia is a superb resource for general information, but I think there's room (and demand) for topical... Read More
It's Saturday morning for me, Friday afternoon in Silicon Valley. Before I go off to the horse races this afternoon (because you needed to know that), here's a quick re-cap of the past week on Read/WriteWeb and in the Web... Read More
Comments
Subscribe to comments for this post OR Subscribe to comments for all Read/WriteWeb posts
The page is not really user-friendly. Hard to find the products.
Posted by: PohEe.com | January 25, 2007 8:05 PMYou've made some interesting points. I'm especially interested in seeing the response since I'm a co-founder of www.productwiki.com (not affiliated with Amazon, although they use our name).
Posted by: Erik Kalviainen | January 25, 2007 8:22 PMSince when "pedia" belong to "Wikipedia"? Before the word encyclopedia exists?
Posted by: TanNg | January 25, 2007 11:39 PMThe name is awfull but would not doubt it catching on...Amazon is just too big......
Posted by: Adrian keys | January 26, 2007 6:58 AMInformation and sharing...
Posted by: Barberman | January 26, 2007 10:43 AMIsn't that what the Internet is designed for?
I love it!
Thanks again for introducing me to another layer of the blogosphere. Since it came to my attention through your blog I felt confident to sign up for Amapedia. Much to my disappointment I was unable to submit a review on Antonio Damasio's (2003) Looking for Spinoza because Amapedia registration only permits users who have purchased something. For now I have this review in both my new Google Docs and Spreadsheet, in my Speechless WordPress Blog and my oceanflynn.vox.combut I tend to use Amazon a lot for reviews as a reader and had hoped to contribute as a writer. This is the first of Web 2.0 type services that makes some purchase requirement as prerequisite for membership. I hope it is not a trend. So far in my experiment on building blogs in Web 2.0, which I began exploring in September 2006, Wordpress and Flickr have provided by far the best free service in terms of content/connectivity.
Thanks for your amazing site which has become a lighthouse for me out here in the blogosphere. I appreciate that your articles are consistently concise, clear and well-referenced.
Maureen Flynn-Burhoe
Posted by: Maureen Flynn-Burhoe | January 27, 2007 2:16 PMI'm wondering how this ads value over and above the current Amazon reviews and new wiki option on Amazon. Seems like a redundant offering and simply another place to go for the same content. That doesn't appeal to me.
Posted by: Billy | January 27, 2007 9:01 PM