Join Amazon’s Amapedia.
Techdirt reports that Amazon has finally launched its product wiki, Amapedia.
Amapedia introduces a new way of organizing product information that we call “collaborative structured tagging”. Articles about products are tagged with a term that describes what the product is (is-a tags) as well as their most important features (facts). We believe that this way of organizing information will make it easy for you to write about the products that you like most. This structured information will also allow other community members to easily discover, filter, and compare related products and product features. Check out Real-time Strategy Games to get a sense of what collaborative structured tagging is about.
As expected with a new site there is little content available so far and the interface is rather poor, but there’s no comprehensive product wiki available today (ProductWiki has a good number of entries with content taken right from other sites).
Here’s an example from Amapedia for a Nikon D50: In addition to a user review it also provides the MPN, ASIN, UPC, Brand and Manufacturer — all essential product descriptors. That combined with user tagging and an API could allow third parties to present the data on other sites (and increase your sales).
Interesting that you can not participate if you’ve never bought anything from Amazon (so they’re probably tracking your contributions) and Amazon is also hinting that it may extend its ClickRiver paid search program to Amapedia to monetize the traffic.
Quick tip: Create objective Amapedia entries for a few of your bestsellers and highlight them to your customers as a means to rate a product. Besides establishing yourself as a category / product expert, who knows, down the road Amazon may tie Amapedia reviews into its search algorithm and/or search results on Amazon and help accelerate your sales. It’s likely to also get you some goodwill with your Amazon category manager.