November 16, 2005

Yellowikis

Aparently there's a wiki yellow pages for company information getting some publicity.

I have a personal interest here. I wrote a company registry module for Infoconomy back in 2000 (that site's running on Philip Greenspun's ACS). It was a good old-fashioned bit of relational modeling, handling international companies with HQs in different countries and multiple branches, categorization, partner and competitor relations etc.

When the site went live, the module was left out. No one, me included, could imagine that they'd launch with the small amount (around 50 companies skeletons, maybe 20 full profiles) of test data that had been entered during development. But researching, writing and entering the data was expensive. And this was a small startup magazine with a few journalists who realized that completing the catalogue was more work than they could handle.

Five years later, Infoconomy, and the CRM system (built by my friends on top of the ACS) seem to be still going strong. But, unless the company registry is hidden behind the subscription firewall, I don't think this feature ever did make it. Yellow-pages represent a great deal of work.

Can a wiki supplant that?

Here's what's good about a wiki. It's cheap. No one has to pay me to write a custom database application. If I was advising anyone who thought of building this kind of application, I'd start with a wiki as an internal prototype of the registry. I'd get them entering the data into wiki pages with some simple markup that could be scraped later.

I'm not quite prepared to stick my neck out and say I think Yellowikis will disrupt the yellow-pages industry. But I'd like to see it try.

3 comments:

David Ingram said...

Yellowikis is a great project, and may I also draw your attention to the www.brownbook.net. It embraces the PRINCIPLES of wiki but does so in a UI that is (I think) more suitable for everyday users.
There is more info on the ethos behind it on the blog here and forum here.
Thanks for the interesting read.

Composing said...

Thanks David,

Will check out brownbook. Another thing that occurs to me now is that what's really missing is an easy way for companies to keep their basic data up-to-date for the directories.

I'm guessing that there must be some kind of XML format for company data these days - companies should be able to maintain the purely factual stuff themselves and have the directory subscribe to changes.

David Ingram said...

I know there is SSE that lets websites auto-update local apps (like your contact list), I wonder of that could be bidirectional, I shall have to check.