If The Book Were Invented Today, Would It Be Revolutionary?

Amazon Finally Gets Around To Launching Semi-Mysterious Wiki Offering

from the mystery-solved dept

Fri, Jan 26th 2007 2:13am — Mike Masnick

Well over a year ago, there were various sightings of the mysterious Amazon "ProductWiki" which would let people create and edit pages about various products. Last month, they apparently finally did a quiet launch of the offering. Of course, there's already a company out there named ProductWiki, and they probably weren't all that thrilled with Amazon's naming choice. Either way, Rogers Cadenhead wrote in to let us know that he's spotted a new service on Amazon called Amapedia, that basically looks like their attempt to perhaps rebrand the ProductWiki concept (though, they still have a website discussing their own ProductWiki). Randomly, if you do a Google search on the name Amapedia, you come up with the resume of an intern who claims he did coding work on Amapedia for Amazon back in 2005. So, it sounds like perhaps that was the original name, but it's bounced around a bit since then. No matter what, it's an interesting idea as a way to try to build up additional info about a product beyond just the typical list of reviews. Like any wiki, though, it all depends on whether or not people use it. Amazon certainly has a lot of users, though, and has done a good job building up a community of reviewers. The trick is converting them to being Amapedians as well.

8 Comments

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Protoplasm, 26 Jan 2007 @ 3:56am

1rst rule is do not self promote. Yeah, this is gonna take off...
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- wtf, 26 Jan 2007 @ 4:24am
  
  Re:
  Isn't advertising self promotion? What the heck are you talking about.
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Anonymous Coward, 26 Jan 2007 @ 4:47am

still looks like a blog to me
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Phlatus the Elder, 26 Jan 2007 @ 4:50am

First rule of what? Commercial failure? I'm not exactly in love with Madison Avenue, but I have to agree with wtf on this one.

As to Amapedia, it might address a problem I've been seeing with Amazon's reader reviews. When you see a gushing write up on a text, then see that the reviewer has done the same for all that author's books (with, perhaps, a couple other authors from the same publisher tossed in), the credibility off all those stars takes a real hit. If Amapedia provides an opportunity to call reviewers on shilling for their buddies, I'm all for it.
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RevMike, 26 Jan 2007 @ 5:37am

ProductWiki?
If you name your site a very generic descriptive name like "ProductWiki", you can't expect that others won't use the same term. Those idiots should've looked into trademark rules before naming their product.
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ArKanoid, 26 Jan 2007 @ 8:45am

ProductWicked
Although it's still early in the "Amapedia" world, I believe it is safe to assume that it will only be used as reviews for products sold on Amazon.com, which leads me to ask what is different between "Amapedia" and a simple "Post Review"? ProductWiki (www.productwiki.com) on the otherhand is a fully comprehensive review of ALL products imaginable, and helpfull articles that have the idea of a smarter consumer in mind. To me, the ProductWiki battle was won long ago by the website of the same name.
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Fake Name, 26 Jan 2007 @ 9:06am

Forget it.
It sucks. It is not needed. Amazon "comments" already work incredibly well. I checked it out, and within two minutes I realized it will fail. It just is not nessesary, as the comments on Amazon are already the perfect resource.
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- Phlatus the Elder, 26 Jan 2007 @ 5:30pm
  
  Re: Forget it.
  Must be one of the shills.
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