ResearchBuzz

More and more resources that I would imagine as regular Web sites are now getting Wiki-ized. Wikinvest, at http://www.wikinvest.com/, provides stock information as Wiki. It’s not comprehensive (looks like about 275 companies are listed), but makes good use of the format.

From the front page you can browse company names or concepts (concepts, for the most part, appear to be industries.), but you can also do a search. As I noted, the stock list is not complete — IAC and LOOK do not have articles here. I did a search for YHOO and did get an article page. The Yahoo Page had an overview of the company, several charts related to its growth, usage, and revenue, and a list of related articles and stocks.

An interesting use of the Wiki format is the “Bulls & Bears” section. Bulls can list/edit ways that Yahoo is good investment, while Bears can do the opposite. Stock charts can be annotated with news/releases to show events that have had an impact on the stock price.

The concept pages are similar to the individual stock pages, except of course they don’t include stock charts. However they do include places for bullish and bearish comments and charts relevant to that industry. Not all industries are available, either — I didn’t see anything for mobile advertising, for example.

Editing the wiki requires absolutely no registration — IP addresses will be recorded for anonymous edits. To get a sense of what’s available here you can browse the listed companies or check out the concepts.

This shouldn’t be too surprising. Search Engine College has announced Search Engine Wiki, which is dedicated to search engines and search engine marketing. It’s in beta at http://www.searchenginewiki.com .

If you can get past the annoying librarian stereotype on the front page, you’ll find several resources here, including a list of search engines for over 200 countries (admittedly many of the countries only have one engine — some engine descriptions here wouldn’t come amiss), a glossary of terms used in SEO, PPM, and related fields (I admit freely I had no idea what CamelCase meant), a list of search engine marketing blog (including ResearchBuzz, which I don’t really consider to be an SEO blog. Just an SE blog) and a list of search industry conferences and events.

There isn’t much commenting going on, and while there’s a lot of information gathered here it suffers from a lack of extensive description. And dude(s), if you’re going to have a list of search engine news sources why don’t you include headlines from their RSS feeds? I’m not sure what software this wiki is running, but maybe SimplePie is an option?

Gotta put this in my “strange but strangely compelling” file…. you can go to http://www.lkozma.net/wpv/index.html and get a Google Map with constantly-changing icons marking anonymous users, where they are around the world, and the pages they’re editing.

The map icons show the pages being edited with a link, summary (if the person editing posted one), location, and when the edit was made. I just sat there and looked for a while — I saw several countries represented and all kinds of topics.

I like tools like this because they put a nice element of randomness in my brain — pages and topics presented with no context or introduction. It’s like a mint for my skull.

Wow, I worked too late today I think. Anyway, this map does not show all Wikipedia edits — only anonymous edits, which have IP addresses. Not all anonymous edits are included (or else the map would be flickering with all the edits constantly going on) and the location may not be absolutely correct. Check out the FAQ for more details. Now I’m going to go stare at the screen for a while…