There has been quite a bit of talk in the past couple of days about Amazon starting a wiki – Church of the Customer started it all but the interesting thing is that no one that I can see (including Church of the Customer) seems to have a link to it anywhere. Some say it’s something that only some people can view – but even still I would have expected links it it.
The wiki is called ProductWiki but most people don’t seem to be able to find out where it comes from. Business Week does have a link to a help page explaining what a wiki is but it doesn’t really refer to an Amazon wiki as such.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/wiki/ currently points to an error page for me – but it’s not a ‘this page doesn’t exist’ type error but one that says they are having problems processing the request. So maybe that’s where it is.
Interestingly (and maybe it is connected – and maybe it’s not) if you go to http://www.productwiki.com/ you’ll find a ‘coming soon’ message – in fact whatever is there is coming very soon – midnight tonight in fact. Perhaps this is the new home for Amazon’s ProductWiki or perhaps someone else is capitalizing on what they see Amazon doing.
The page design doesn’t look very Amazon-ish and they tend to keep everything on the one domain so I’m not sure it’s officially Amazon or not but time will tell.
update: a whois on the www.productwiki.com site has no obvious connection to Amazon. It’s registered to Amanie Ismail from Canada. Probably a dead end to that lead.
update II: I’ve just had an IM from Tim Flight who says he can see Wiki links on normal Amazon pages. They also have a description as follows:
You can create Wikis about a many different things on Amazon. For example, you might create a Wiki to describe a particular opera recording. Within that Wiki you could create links to Wiki entries defining words such as “soprano” and “coloratura”.
You can view how a particular Wiki entry has changed over time, to see who has contributed what and when, and you can subscribe to be notified by email of any future updates to Wikis you are interested in.
A list of Wikis you have contributed to appears on your Your Amazon Home and Profile pages.
Interesting. Obviously I’m living in the wrong part of the world (again) to participate in it but it looks like an interesting interaction with customers by Amazon.
