We weren't kidding when we said Wikis are now serious business. For music, WikiAudio is providing a new way to educated music fanatics. While music fans visit sites like Last.fm, Imeem, and Myspace for their music fix, musicians and producers can head over to one of the largest and most comprehensive audio wiki's ever.
Sites like Last.fm, Imeem, Myspace, iLike, and more are limited when it comes to music. There's only so much information these sites give about music genres and music as a whole. Their only purpose is to promote material rather an educate the masses on other areas of music outside of just artists and the most popular songs out. WikiAudio does the exact opposite. There's a host of educational information about music and the production of it. The site offers a range of information about the jargon that only serious musicians would use and understand.
Conceived by Bill Turner and co-founded by Lathan Hodge, WikiAudio is essentially one enormous wiki on music. However, it's not about artist. The wiki's sole focus is the "art and science of anything audio or sound related". At WikiAudio you can learn about a new recording technique, build an API preamp from scratch, get tips on how to use features in music production software, and a host of other great things. Using the site is the same as using any other wiki. You just type in what you're looking for to get the information. Though it's necessary to sign-up in order to create or modify a new article or tutorial, registration wasn't necessary for browsing the site and accessing the majority of the site's features.
WikiAudio does a great job of combining both social networking and "Wiki" landscapes to create a hybrid that incorporates articles, videos, audio files, tutorials, user profiles, forums, blogs, RSS feeds, and more. Producers, musicians, and music majors will find WikiAudio to be a candy store full of free and useful sweets. There are plenty of tutorials available and veterans of audio production are encourage to help the beginners of the site by creating tutorials of their personal productions and techniques.
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Wow - wikis have come such a long way. Never thought that they would ever be profitable.
Posted by: Pyrmont | June 7, 2008 9:17 PM
Last.FM does have a wiki component to it. http://www.last.fm/wiki/ although it is purely about the artists.
WikiAudio sounds cool, will add it to WikiIndex.org!
Posted by: Mark | June 7, 2008 9:31 PM
This is really cool. I notice it's powered by MindTouch Deki. Excellent! It looks like the site might need some hardening though. It just went down. :-( Perhaps RWW took it down. :-( eeek.
For the record, MindTouch Deki, the software powering www.wikiaudio.com, will easily scale over 30 Million pageviews a month out-of-the-box without introducing any of several potential caching schemes. http://wiki.opengarden.org/Deki_Wiki/Release/Jay_Cooke_(8.05)/8.0.5.1_Optimizations
In fear of being a salesy wanker I'll point out that MindTouch sells Enterprise Support http://wiki.mindtouch.com/Enterprise_Pricing for those doing production deployments like this.
Thanks for the write up. I'm glad to have found this. When the site is back up maybe I can find pointers on how to NOT make our demo video audio sound like it's recorded in the bathroom. :-) http://www.viddler.com/explore/MindTouch/videos/36/
Posted by: Aaron Fulkerson | June 7, 2008 9:51 PM
@Pyrmont : wikis were profitable from the start - that is if you take the point of view of users, not of businesses trying to monetize the tool.
Posted by: Jean-Marc Liotier | June 8, 2008 10:22 AM
While maybe not in the same category as WikiAudio, the Whole Wheat Radio Wiki uses MediaWiki software to allow independent musicians to share their music. It's a wiki radio station. You can request songs and watch the queue to see when your selection will be played. Users can rate songs and participate in discussions.
Posted by: jr | June 9, 2008 11:04 AM