Wiki means quick in Hawaiian and the adjective was made a noun by Ward Cunningham when he developed the first Wiki website where users could easily edit information and share ideas.

Eurekster has used search for an even Wiki-er way of developing and sharing knowledge on subjects.

Its “swickis” allow users to build and customise a specialised search portal on any topic. As other users carry out searches on it, it becomes smarter and more relevant.

This month, Eurekster has partnered with the Blinkx video search engine to enable video swickis. They can also be accessed through a “buzzcloud” widget. As in the Family Guy example below, it can be pasted into any blog.

var swickiSidebar= { quickFormat: ‘_QUICKFORMAT_’, // for html = {’narrow’, ’short’, ‘wide’} canvasColor: ‘_BACKGROUND_’, // use ‘#EEAAFF’ hex format or TextColor: ‘_TEXTCOLOR_’, // web standard color names TagLinkColor: ‘_LINKCOLOR_’, TagHoverBGColor: ‘_BGHOVER_’, TagFontFamily: ‘_FONT_’, // eg. ‘Times New Roman’ or ‘Arial’ TagFontSizeMax: _FONTMAX_, // eg. 24pt TagFontSizeDiff: _FONTDIFF_ // eg. 5 };

Grab this swicki from eurekster.com

There are already more than 100,000 swickis, which can all be distributed and monetised by their creators with ad placements. San Francisco-based Eurekster takes a share of revenues.

The video swickis pose new advertising challenges and Eurekster is going to test various ways of inserting ads into the feeds.

Meanwhile, Blinkx is experimenting with an advertising platform it calls Ad Hoc. Using speech-to-text technology, metadata, behavioural targeting and some visual analysis, it hopes to serve more relevant ads to video watchers.

October 8th, 2007 in Digital media, Internet, Media | Permalink