Here is something to watch.
Amapedia is from Amazon:
Amapedia introduces an exciting new way of organizing products we call “collaborative structured tagging”. In a nutshell, it makes it easy for you to tag products with what they are and with their most important facts, and for others to search, discover, filter, and compare products by those tags. [Amapedia home page]
It is early days and it is still sparsely populated. For example, there is not a developed Wii page, a product which is certainly in the news. They do not appear to have moved over the reviews and ratings from the main Amazon site. They do note that they have moved data gathered through their ProductWiki initiative forward into this environment.
There are guidelines for entries.
Amazon sources contribution through a variety of sites now, in slightly different ways (for example, there is a variable focus on some combination of reviews, ratings and tags across the services). IMDB.com is of course a central site for movies. Endless.com is a new site for shoes and bags with some very nice features. We have Amapedia and Amazon itself. I wonder whether in due course we will see them syndicate tags through Amazon Web Services. This would make sense if they follow the pattern with some of their other services, where they argue that they want to extract as much value as possible from capacity they have build for themselves (see their storage and compute services, as well as their various data services).
I notice links to Amapedia popping up inside Amazon. As do links to that other ‘beta’ Amazon site, Askville, a question/answer service.
