Short version: Wetpaint might be one to watch.
Long version: TechCrunch's Michael Arrington has alerted us to a dark horse candidate in the race to dominate the land of wikis. It's Wetpaint, a Seattle-based service we haven't heard a whole lot from lately. The reason, Arrington says, is that it's positioning itself to be a player in niche social networks, not just mini-Wikipedias.
The easy-to-create wiki service pulled in 3 million page views in March, according to ComScore numbers, compared with 3.8 million for Ning, the well-funded social-network creator helmed by Marc Andreessen. Wetpaint also claims 900,000 wikis have been created, far more than the 263,000 that Ning counts (though who knows how many of those are legitimate and/or active). While Ning's way ahead in traffic, a few months ago Wetpaint released a set of features to ramp up social-networking activity on the site, with friends lists, news feeds, member profiles, and Yelp-style "compliments" now in the mix.
There are also 70 "sponsored" Wetpaint wikis, like the fan wikis created by cable network Showtime for each of its programs.
This guy could probably have used some help from Whiskipedia to learn just how much that J.D. would knock him out. (I took this photo in college.)
(Credit: Caroline McCarthy/Long Before CNET News.com)Confession: I don't know a whole lot about alcoholic beverages. I'm that girl who pours blue Curacao into stuff simply because it turns your drink a cool color. I don't actually know what it is. That's probably not a good thing.
My cluelessness is starting to give my friends headaches--literally. I read in The New York Times that rose champagne was going to be really trendy this season, so I got some for a New Year's Eve party, only to learn that the stuff tastes even worse than regular (cheap) champagne and makes you feel even worse the next day. (And it's pink, so guys won't touch it.)
So I'm keeping my fingers crossed that 2008 will shape up to be the year of the booze industry's full-out digital debut. We're off to a good start. On New Year's Day, as many of us were still whimpering about hangovers, Whiskipedia launched. It's exactly what you think it is--a wiki about whiskey, or whisky, or however you spell it. Like its namesake Wikipedia, user contributions will keep the site's content flowing, but the site has expert oversight from administrator Ian Buxton (of The Whisky Channel) and the preliminary content was derived from the book Whisky: A Book of Words.
Of course, it's just about whiskey, so it couldn't help me learn how to avoid crappy champagne. But maybe it's a start. Here's to hoping that Whiskipedia sets a fine new precedent for online booze information dissemination. Because, really, I can't be the only clueless person out there.
(And ideally, perhaps better education will lead to more responsible drinking.)
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