Amazon Gets Wikified, Adds Discussion Groups

Amazon, you're driving me crazy. You don't have a blog and I can't get any of your PR people to answer e-mail. So when I find really nifty things like the Amazon Wiki that seems to be happening, I can't find anyone to talk to about it! Is this part of more extensive Amazon plans to open their site? Will the Wiki be integrated with tags? Can more extensive RSS feeds be far behind? These and other questions -- but meantime you can play with the Wiki. At least I hope you can; it doesn't appear to be available to all visitors.

Logged in to Amazon, go to a product page. You'll see on the page (hopefully) a link to a ProductWiki (here's a screenshot from Flickr.) The only problem I found is that I couldn't find a product that had any information yet!

Hey, while Amazon's going for the product information, they've also added discussion groups. I didn't see discussion groups for everything, but I did see one for the latest Harry Potter.. There were several discussions available about many different aspects of the book; while anyone can read the discussions, apparently only Amazon account holders who have purchased an Amazon item can participate. More details in the Amazon documents.

I think the additions of Wikis and discussions are both very good ideas, however I will admit to being very surprised. It always seemed to me that Amazon resisted being open to the Web -- they wanted to be more of a self-contained unit. However with these new features they'd be open to both consumer-generated content and links from the Web. (Unless they're going to prohibit those in Wikis? Seems unlikely.) I never realized how much I'd gotten used to reading corporate blogs when I thought, "I'll have to go check out Amazon's corporate blog and see how they're thinking about this" and then realized I couldn't...

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