Business Information in Wiki Format

Now this is interesting, though there isn't a whole lot here yet. Yellowikis, at http://www.yellowikis.org/ , aims to provide information on individual businesses in a Wiki format. It launched in January, but there isn't a lot here yet. I can see by the listings I stumbled across, though, that they aim to be really international.

If you've ever used Wikis the front page'll be familiar to you -- it's full of news and notes about the project. The search is on the left. I searched for coffee. I've been searching for coffee a lot lately...

I got no company results, but three "Article Title" matches, and since there's one company per page, these were as good as company matches. There was a company in Ethiopia, one in the UK, and one article "stub" that did not have a location.

Information on each company page varies, but types of information available includes address, Web address, map link, phone and fax numbers, business description, and business profile. The Yellowikis creators ask that at least an industry and country code are included with each entry.

From the about page: "Small companies - particularly those in developing countries don't find it easy to set up their own web pages and get them ranked by Google and the other search engines. We hope that a simple entry in Yellowikis will help level the playing field."

I think that's a noble aim and I wish them much luck. However I'm concerned that this is a huge amount of territory to cover. Would it be easier to pick media from each of the less-represented countries and work with them to solicit listings from the business public? On the other hand, a group in a town or the region of a state could do some wonderful things with a business Wiki like this. A marvelous idea; I'm just worried, in this case, about the attempted scope.

Posted to Business-Search | TrackBack