{"id":928,"date":"2007-01-26T11:46:28","date_gmt":"2007-01-26T16:46:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mathewingram.com\/work\/2007\/01\/26\/a-wikipedia-dedicated-to-shopping\/"},"modified":"2007-01-26T11:46:28","modified_gmt":"2007-01-26T16:46:28","slug":"a-wikipedia-dedicated-to-shopping","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2007\/01\/26\/a-wikipedia-dedicated-to-shopping\/","title":{"rendered":"A Wikipedia dedicated to shopping"},"content":{"rendered":"

Although it often gets dismissed as a boring, Web 1.0 retailer at heart, Amazon has been doing a lot more innovative things than it gets credit for — including its very Web 2.0-ish S3 distributed storage service<\/a> (which more startups should make use of) and its EC2 virtual server offering. And now, Amazon has jumped into the wiki business as well, with the “Amapedia,” a wiki devoted to products, which was discovered by<\/a> the resourceful Rogers Cadenhead.<\/p>\n

It’s still so new that there’s very little content in the Amapedia, but it has a very clean interface — arguably even cleaner and easier to follow than Wikipedia’s. There’s a featured product on the landing page<\/a>, and then a big “tag cloud” of keywords. When you click on something like “camera,” you get taken to a main page with a description of the product, and on the left-hand side there is a breakdown of the cameras in various sub-categories.<\/p>\n

\"amapedia.jpg\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Obviously, there are going to be issues with something like Amapedia, as there are with Wikipedia, which has been involved in all sorts of<\/a> scandals that have to do with accuracy, vandalism, and accusations of elitism. As a small example, the Amapedia entry for camera says the word is “Italian for room.” Close, but no cigar. Camera is actually Latin for room, although Italian is derived from Latin. <\/p>\n

With the Microsoft\/Wikipedia kerfuffle so fresh, I wonder how long before companies start paying people to make entries in Amapedia (I give it about a month). The new service is apparently an expansion of the “product wikis” that Amazon launched awhile back, and the info from them has already been incorporated<\/a> into Amapedia, according to Read\/Write Web.<\/p>\n

Rogers Cadenhead, meanwhile — who says that in honour of having discovered Amapedia first, he should be made king of this new fiefdom and addressed as “Amazimbo” — wonders whether Amazon will compensate those who contribute the most to its entries, with a discount coupon or some variation thereon. Not a bad idea. And does it matter that a product-oriented wiki already exists<\/a>?<\/p>\n

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Although it often gets dismissed as a boring, Web 1.0 retailer at heart, Amazon has been doing a lot more innovative things than it gets credit for — including its very Web 2.0-ish S3 distributed storage service (which more startups should make use of) and its EC2 virtual server offering. And now, Amazon has jumped … <\/p>\n

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