Seattle based wiki-startup Wetpaint has been talking to a number of big content sites about a new product they’ll be releasing soon, we’ve heard. The screen shot above is a mock-up that Wetpaint is using to pitch potential partners.
The product is an embeddable wysiwyg wiki. That alone is interesting, just because there aren’t any easy ways to embed a wiki into third party sites today. Google Sites doesn’t yet allow embeds, for example. PBWiki, a popular wiki startup, does allow embeds via their API, but it isn’t as simple to use as most widgets.
But what we’re hearing is that this isn’t a simple javascript or Flash embed. It’s a deeper integration that requires an insertion of code into a site’s back end application files. That allows the wiki to be created at the server level, not simply rendered in the user’s browser like most widgets. The idea is a pretty straightforward way to go about doing this, although we haven’t heard of any products doing this before.
Why is that interesting? It’s interesting because it pulls the Wiki content directly into a site’s HTML and allows it to be indexed by search engines. That means partner sites will get the SEO benefits of the wiki, a major plus for these partners.
That’s all we know for now. The product is being called Balco, although that may be an internal project name, not the name of the to-be-launched product. If Balco is as useful as we’re hearing, it’s definitely something we’ll use here at TechCrunch.
Update: PBWiki’s David Weekly adds something related to this in his API documentation (scroll to bottom). When/if Wetpaint launches Balco, we’ll do a side by side comparison.
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The SEO is interesting…..but if the same wiki is on a bunch of sites….duplicate content issues?
Sounds like an interesting offering from wetpaint. Will definitely keep my eye on this one as you are right it, it will be a tool that would be great for SEO…all that unique and keyword rich contented added your your site in wiki format… good stuff.
WetPaint wikis are very simple.Any one can srart.
this is a great idea. lets hope it lives up to it.
Probably too wet… the screenshot image smears…
see… now i’m leary… is it gonna be a series of impossible technology posts for april fools or did someone actually pull this one off? if so… that’s rocking and will probably prove to be a pretty big deal… otherwise… isn’t one joke enough? hehehe…
This is definitely a useful innovation for public-facing sites that want to incorporate wikis. While the plugin method would still allow indexability, it would index the wiki pages as opposed to the embedded pages.
I wonder how difficult it will be to incorporate on the server side? If it’s easy, I can see it being pretty useful.
Also, are any other Bay Area folks a little surprised by the “Balco” codename? Wikis on steroids?
If it gets integrated in the backend, it’ll be interesting to see what kinds of security issues that poses. Also, do they have access to all content you create? Currently they show recent updates on their homepage.
Doubtful Balco is the real name, given it’s high standing in the world of baseball: http://www.contracostatimes.com/news/ci_8727080
look forward to this we’ll have to see if it delivers
the problem is that Google has started heavily penalizing duplicate content sites in the last 2 months (go read the rants on webmasterworld). Having duplicate wiki content might even inadvertently blacklist your site!
will - there’s no reason to believe the content will be duplicated at wetpaint…
PBwiki can let you inline both private and public data server-side as well with just a line or two of PHP. Check “Server-Side Inlining” at the bottom of http://api.pbwiki.com/
PBwiki still takes care of hosting the data and the editor; particularly useful if you’re just server-side republishing one or two pages of an otherwise very private wiki and you don’t need to worry about accidental exposure. But you get the SEO benefit of having the content inline. (To be clear, this is not a new feature announcement - this has all been working for well over a year.)
@11.. isn’t that Google’s problem, instead of the users/communities’ problem?..
..in principle, that is.
Haha Balco and their example is baseball. That’s fun.
Wetpaint is rather silly in my opinion. Wikis are mostly lame. there are VERY few scenarios in which people need a truly collaborative website - e.g. a parent site for your son’s baseball team. things like this are MUCH better served by even old school Yahoo Groups. Or the new wiki from google - only on their apps site -which does this exact thing
wordpress 2.5 upgrade just happened and they are finally making it easy to use.
wetpaint has no future in my opinion. just not seeing it. the only sites on wetpaint that are getting any traffic are a few commercial ones. the rest are many LAME sites that people do not actually use. mark my words - play around with some of the sites. i’ve never seen so much junk in my life.
and if a site is using wetpaint to be a message board, how is that different than creating a website and adding phpbb as a message board? even 1and 1 hosting now offers phpbb as a free plug-in.
just my 2 cents
bill
Sounds like a “Server-side Ajax request mechanism”. That’s what we use on feed.us.
Yeah… definitely check out http://Feed.Us they’re already doing the same thing… sans the WIKI. But like Bill said, how often do you really need a WIKI? What’s more relevant is the technological advance.
Congrats to both Wetpaint and PBwiki. MindTouch Deki Wiki has had a decoupled presentation layer and editor (making our tech capable of this) since our “Hayes” release *last July*. Of course, all of MindTouch’s Deki Wiki is decoupled, more info: http://mindtouch.com/Technology
Of course, MindTouch is also very different because it’s open source (free to download) and focused on the enterprise rather than consumers. MindTouch allows IT admins or business users to connect enterprise systems, Web 2.0 apps, and web-services. Allowing end users to organize data and systems in a way most appropriate to them. Yes, it’s a wiki.
MindTouch does offer a Wetpaint/PBwiki competitive shared hosted offering that’s free and ad-free here: http://wik.is
I little too much positive talk on this one. I smell fish.
Harry “I know fish” Wang
@16
I think I remember hearing things like that when it came to mobile phone developments…
Stopping in to say..
Wetpaint is known to have great developers developing their product.. Balco is just another GREAT addition they are adding for their network.
Josh