Amazon relaunches ProductWikis as Amapedia

In mid-2006, Amazon added a Wikipedia-like feature to many of its product detail pages. Much like the famous online encyclopedia, Amazon's ProductWiki feature allowed anyone to create or edit content related to products being sold on Amazon.

Now Amazon has quietly relaunched the wiki feature, establishing its own domain and a new name, Amapedia. The change was phased in a couple of weeks ago with very little fanfare. There's still less than a dozen "Amapedia" references on Google.

Meanwhile Amazon has beefed up its guidelines for wiki content, and is warning authors not to spam the feature without at least disclosing the conflict of interest:

Disclose if you are affiliated with the product, such as being the author of a book (or the spouse or close friend of the author)

Three things worth noting:

• Amazon may have changed the name after complaints from an existing company using the ProductWiki name.

• With establishment of the new domain, Amazon has offloaded much of the wiki content from product detail pages, helping to reduce the bloat. That's a good thing -- those pages were getting as long as a country mile.
  

• Amazon is increasingly emphasizing its "community" features. Perhaps the plan is to build an active site at Amapedia that will organize and inject fresh traffic onto Amazon. The wiki feature certainly hadn't gotten much attention stuffed at the bottom of the .com product detail pages.

In the meantime, Amazon's help page on ProductWikis remains unchanged. Interestingly, Amapedia seems to have been the brainchild of an Amazon intern who worked on the coding during 2005. (Thanks, TechDirt.)

Here's my take: Amazon already has critical mass with "customer reviews." This feature is Amazon's "killer app" -- people understand it and value it. To me, it means user-generated book reviews, which are usually a heck of a lot more useful than "professional" book reviews. Amazon's amateur book reviews are a better example of the power of user-generated content than Wikipedia, if you ask me.

Perhaps Amazon should consider augmenting the customer-review feature with more community capabilities. Obviously, most users don't understand or see any added value in product wikis. Trust me, most Amazon users don't want to think about "collaborative structured tagging."

Now that's *really* plugging your book!

Tech pundit Lawrence Lessig not only offers free downloads of his books, he makes sure the downloads are really fast. His new one, Codev2, is stored on an Amazon EC2 server, ensuring that just about any bandwidth requirement can be met.

Codev2 was written in part through a collaborative wiki, available here. The text was licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License, and all royalties are dedicated to Creative Commons.

You can download the book as a PDF here. Of course you can also buy the physical book, which Lessig points out is cheaper than printing it on your laser printer.

Lessig is a law professor at Stanford and founded its Center for Internet and Society. He advocates reduced legal restrictions on copyright and trademark, especially with technology applications.