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Amazon’s Product Wiki, Amapedia

Amazon has been playing with wiki’s for awhile now, and it looks like they are trying to use one to cash in on the web 2.0, user generated content wave by launching Amapedia.com. This looks like a good match for Amazon, taking advantage of their large user base, they should be able to fill it out pretty quickly, as it is right now, it looks pretty dead. They certainly could’ve picked a better name, when I first saw it, I thought it was a map site.

Amapedia is a community for sharing information about the products you like the most.

Amapedia introduces an exciting new way of organizing products we call “collaborative structured tagging”. In a nutshell, it makes it easy for you to tag products with what they are and with their most important facts, and for others to search, discover, filter, and compare products by those tags.

Amapedia is the next generation of Amazon.com’s ProductWiki feature; all of your previous ProductWiki contributions were preserved and now live here.

Their Do’s and don’ts:

Do:

1. write about your favorite products

2. quantify why you like or dislike a product as much as possible (”oh, I didn’t like it” without any context is not very helpful to others)
3. provide useful facts that you think would be helpful to others
4. cite your sources
5. disclose if you are affiliated with the product, such as being the author of a book (or the spouse or close friend of the author)

Do Not:

1. self-promote by referring to yourself, your work, or your Web sites in an article that is unrelated to your self-promotion

2. store personal photos
3. create a personal home page (we may support that in the future)
4. talk in the first person in the main body of product articles (that’s what the “Anecdotes, Experiences, Opinions, Comments” section is for)
5. express personal opinions about things that are not products (i.e., while we are very interested in your opinion about a book about the Iraq war — particularly so if you can calmly document specific good and bad points about it — we are not at all interested in your personal opinions about the Iraq war itself on this site)
6. accept payments or gifts from anyone to edit material on amapedia

Looks like they have already learned what not to do, notice they mention not to accept payments or gifts to edit articles on the site. They mentioned that there will be contextual ads on the view, search, and compare pages, and maybe others, so, this will probably not be liked by their affiliates, although it’s not being promoted very much, yet.

When you check some of the random articles, you can see some uses are naming the titles, or something is wrong in the process as quite a few I tried had the asin number as the name. Some really don’t have any other info than the title, asin numbers ad facts. On the product pages on Amazon’s site, I’ve only seen a couple links at the bottom of the page about being the first to submit it to amapedia, etc, but well below the fold. I’m surprised they aren’t just copying over some of the reviews for content, at least that I have seen, but the more content the better, right? The products that already have a page on amapedia have a little quote and a link to the article.

I wonder how long it will be before they add user blogs, IM and email. That might be pushing it, but you never know, they already have plogs, a personalized web log that appears on your customer home page, and allows you to provide feedback to the Amazon blogs. The tagging feature should prove to be interesting one day as it will contain the most popular items on one of the Internet’s biggest sites, and should be a great place to get some new keywords.

Does anyone think this site will be abused?

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