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.comÄôs
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.
